Entertainment

Nah, he's read The Hero with a Thousand Faces and/or subscribes to Suber's ideas in The Power of Film and is doing a mental checklist of what Marvel lacks.

Marvel hits the main points of a Hero story most of the time -- where we have a Hero who comes from one place, goes 'adventuring' elsewhere and ends up doing a 'thing' that benefits the ordinary folks -- but the frequency of needing a HERO over and over, and the escalation of what's at stake (the whole world, the galaxy, universe, multi-verse, existence itself) means that after you've seen a few Marvel movies, the characters aren't doing things that are new or different from what they did in other movies. Saving 'normies' is their day-job. Yeah, the path is different each time, but we keep seeing the same Heroes and most of them aren't getting transformed by the journey and there are too many cases where the 'sacrifice' they make doesn't have any real choice involved (if you can opt walk away from the drama then staying or doing 'X' is a sacrifice, but it's no sacrifice if leaving means you die anyway).

Suber suggests that a hero often has to GO AWAY at the end of the story. The normies are happy for help, but then they want to get back to raising their kids and the Hero is not good for that. I like that idea. More than that, I think that is the critic's actual complaint. He sees this as another story in the same universe (multiverse) with the same characters and he wants something new rather than something comfortably familiar -- and that's HIS problem because lots of us would like more stories about the Heroes we've come to know and love.

If it matters, my favorite Marvel story is the Loki TV series. It hits many of the expected markers and both the lead-up to- and the actual-ending both really resonated for me.