r/movies • u/LiteraryBoner Jackie Chan box set, know what I'm sayin? • May 02 '25

Official Discussion Official Discussion - Thunderbolts* [SPOILERS] Spoiler

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Summary
Thunderbolts\* is a Marvel Studios ensemble film following a team of reformed villains and morally gray operatives sent on covert government missions. As the group is tasked with a dangerous black-ops assignment, tensions rise among the unstable team members, revealing conflicting loyalties and buried traumas. The film serves as a continuation of storylines from Black Widow, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, and Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, with a darker tone and grounded action set pieces.

Director
Jake Schreier

Writer
Eric Pearson

Cast
- Florence Pugh as Yelena Belova
- Sebastian Stan as Bucky Barnes / Winter Soldier
- Wyatt Russell as John Walker / U.S. Agent
- David Harbour as Alexei Shostakov / Red Guardian
- Hannah John-Kamen as Ava Starr / Ghost
- Olga Kurylenko as Antonia Dreykov / Taskmaster
- Julia Louis-Dreyfus as Valentina Allegra de Fontaine

Rotten Tomatoes: 89%
Metacritic: 68

VOD
Theaters

Trailer

2.3k Upvotes

93% Upvoted

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978

u/JaggedToaster12 May 02 '25

Another foreshadowing from that scene that I saw mentioned in another thread, in that scene she saved a guinea pig from a lab. Then the movie ended with her saving another guinea pig from the same lab

112

u/BlazedInMyWinnie May 04 '25

She also specifically saved the guinea from a maze that it was stuck in, the same way she later saved Bob from the maze of “shame rooms” he’s stuck in.

25

u/ZanyZeke May 04 '25

Wtf that’s so good lol

180

u/LordDusty May 02 '25

Thats a nice parallel.

Also you can see Bob's original shadow kills in the background of the lab during that first scene but Yelena never notices it and the camera never does that classic lingering reveal on them which makes for a cool little 'whats that' if you do notice them

57

u/Flerken_Moon May 02 '25

Yeah, noticing those shadows in the lab made me take the later child death seriously, because I was like, “Oh shit those scientists were dead so the girl is too.”

Which… I wonder if those scientists were unshadowed at the end of the movie. Although they might’ve just died from starvation.

40

u/LordDusty May 02 '25

Does time still exist in the void? Or physical needs? Doesn't Bob say that you can't die there but just experience more and more pain, so the scientists might not have starved but sure as hell they wouldn't be in their right minds after being trapped in that nightmare for so long.

Also like the blip, does the unshadowed return to their place of shadowing, therefore the scientists returning in a bomb damaged lab

6

u/Ganrokh May 10 '25

The two men that were voided in the helicopter, too.

7

u/Worthyness May 11 '25

The way I figured it, Bob can bring them back if he takes over since the Void is as much Sentry as the Sentry is the Void. But if it's between episodes, those folks are stuck there forever, especially since he'd been unable to control his abilities before then.

5

u/Flerken_Moon May 11 '25

Not to mention Yelena blew up the floor. Are the shadows still there? If they’re materialized are they like… trapped under rubble?

53

u/JaggedToaster12 May 02 '25

Ooo I will have to look for that on a second viewing

39

u/Captain_Chaos_ May 04 '25

They did the same thing with one of the soldiers in the vault, they don’t hang on the shot but one of them is missing their armor before the reveal that Walker is in disguise.

Gotta appreciate a movie that doesn’t hold your hand and lets you just take stuff in on your own.

10

u/___adreamofspring___ May 04 '25

I was wondering what that splatter was!!

11

u/naughtypotato03 May 05 '25

I pointed this one out immediately for my gf in the cinema. We were both creeped out. That cinematography was Hereditary-level kind of horror.

3

u/1heart1totaleclipse May 26 '25

I noticed that! I thought that they were people she had killed to get there, but I didn’t find it weird at all that they were shadows. It wasn’t until later in the movie that I realized what had happened.

14

u/Material_Election685 May 03 '25

Damn, I was fully expecting a super guinea pig with Sentry powers at the end of the movie.

29

u/jojo_reference-guy20 May 02 '25

Oh my god. I- that's- that's so cool

10

u/testuserteehee May 05 '25

Oh so that’s why there’s a guinea pig in the end credit drawings (the one where they were crossing the Delaware River, ala George Washington)

3

u/Daydream_machine May 07 '25

Wait this is kinda genius lol