Man, I SO hope they keep Shang and Katie platonic. Need more guy/gal friendships that don't end up romantic.

Fun Fact: There's a comic book series where Spider-Man loses his spider sense so he goes to Shang-Chi to learn his way of martial arts to compensate for the loss. He ends up combining his own combat style with Shang-Chi's martial arts and creates the Way of the Spider.

this movie has some of the best fight scenes in Marvel. a lot of respect paid to the Jakie style of fight chorography. no wonder when i dug into it a bit, there are a lot of the guys worked with him

The pauses you mentioned might be because Tony Leung (Wenwu) acts a lot with his eyes. On a rewatch, you can see so many moments that show he does truly care for his family -- he just doesn't know how to be a good father.

Surprised you werent feeling the acting in that scene near the end. My wife and I still talk about how great the emotion was conveyed purely through Tony Leung’s acting in that scene

I think if you're thousands of years old and you lose the love of your life, maybe genocidal maniac is not that big of a stretch hahaha

If you want to see the story of how Trevor ended up at Wenwu's base, the 'All Hail the King' short can be viewed on Disney+ and it tells that story. :)

Wenwu is probably one of my top 3 favorite antagonists in the MCU... An ancient warlord making a massive power grab makes a lot of sense... although I wonder why he didn't rule the world... Reforms, honestly becomes a good person (for a while)... You can't really blame him for going so agro when Ying Li is killed. Did he react poorly? Yes, but he spent centuries, with nothing able to harm him, he gives it up, and loses his wife, presumably the only romantic love of his life, or atleast the most important one. Picking the rings back up and relentlessly pursuing revenge/trying to get his wife back, makes sense. Like Vulture, he doesn't need to rule the universe or destory Tony Stark, he just wants his wife back.

“Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” if you want to see more of the cable and wire stunts that was in Shang Chi! It’s a beautiful movie and just scratches the surface of the great wire work and stunts that has been in Asian cinema for decades!

Best moment (well, for me anyway): Trevor's Planet Of The Apes monologue. How he gets to be so hilarious and profound at the same time... Sir Ben Kingsley has not done nearly enough comedy in his career.

“Eye for an eye doesn’t need to be a thing” “Violence isn’t the answer”

You said "Loss of your life partner seems to be what fuels a lot of these villains"

"I'm not feeling the acting in this"

There was a One Shot (short film) called All Hail the King showing Trevor in prison and getting captured by a Ten Rings agent who revealed there was a real mandarin. It’s on Disney Plus

What I love about Ta Lo is that the animals are all based on Chinese mythical creatures. Those "Ninetails" (along with the Pokemon Ninetails) were inspired by mythical foxes in various East Asian mythologies. The lion looks like the guardian lion statues that guard both sides of a doorway to a Chinese temple. And Morris is a hundun, a faceless winged creature born from the chaos of the universe.

"Why didnt they do that with his dad" His Dad used the rings and they only glowed blue-ish/purple-ish but when Shang-Chi used them they had a different color so they probably had a different energy structure too. His Mother changed the color of the rings as well but back then nobody was monitoring stuff like this throughout the world so it went unnoticed. I guess the change of Ownership and change of energy (lets call it that for now) activated the beacon again and Wong noticed it just then when the finaly fight in Ta Lo happened

So, the scene where Aunt Nan opens Shang Chi's fist is a reference to the idea that in martial arts that there are two basic combat philosophies. First you have the "Hard" styles which rare the ones which emphasize outer strength like literal physical strength styles such as Karate, Boxing, Muay Thai and so forth hard styles are referred to as "Closed fist". Then there are the "soft" styles which emphasize inner strength such as willpower and tend to be more about stopping your for by using his own energy against him these styles are more like Aikido or Tai Chi and are sometimes called "open hand."

Things I love about this movie:

This was one of those rare movies where my expectations were super high going into it, and were then delivered!

you can only really appreciate the casting in this if you grew up with hongkong action movies... Tony Leung and Michelle Yeoh are absolute legends! and kinda funny that this is Leungs first non-chinese/hongkong movie considering how long he is in the business!