Wacky Ranks: The MCU

CaptainWacky

I want to smell dark matter
I'm going to rewatch every MCU movie and rank them in this thread as I go. I will watch the Disney+ tv shows and probably rank them separately (I haven't decided yet) once I get to them. I won't be watching things like Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and the Netflix shows, sorry! It will probably take me years to finish this thread, if I ever do, as I'll probably only be watching the movies on Sundays when I have nothing else to watch.

Anyway, here's the big list of every MCU movie ranked from best to worst! I will edit this opening post with every movie.

1) Avengers Assemble (2012)
2) Iron Man (2008)
3) Iron Man 3 (2013)
4) Captain America: The First Avenger (2011)
5) Thor (2011)
6) The Incredible Hulk (2008)
7) Iron Man 2 (2010)
 
Last edited:

CaptainWacky

I want to smell dark matter
Iron Man

Directed by Jon Favreau

Screenplay by Mark Fergus & Hank Ostby and Art Marcum & Matt Holloway

Released May 2nd 2008



I knew very little about the character Iron Man until shortly before this movie’s release. I think I started reading superhero comics around 2007? (I downloaded the entire Marvel ‘Civil War’ event, including all spin-off titles. It seemed good at the time!) It’s fair to say Tony Stark was not a name the general public would have recognised. Superman, Batman, Spider-Man? The X-Men? Those are all man-themed characters who people would know in 2008, but not Iron Man. Marvel Studios couldn’t use many of their most famous characters when starting their shared cinematic universe as the rights belonged to other studios. Iron Man might not have been well known, but he turned out to be the perfect character to start with. So why was this movie such a hit and why did Iron Man as a character work so well in it?

I’m not a great writer, okay, so don’t expect any amazing original (or well-worded!) insights here. There’s plenty of actual professionally written artcles out there about this film and the MCU as a whole. What it seems to me is that they got the tone of the movie exactly right. It’s not ashamed to be a comic book movie, there’s no “what did you expect, yellow spandex?” type lines here. Comic book readers would appreciate the details like recognising Tony’s various armours and such. But more importantly, if you haven’t read comics and don’t know who the fuck Tony Stark is, this still feels like a cool fun action movie. It’s funny but not stupid. It has a man flying in a robot-suit he built but it doesn’t feel goofy. It’s good; it’s a good movie. It was released the same year as The Dark Knight, the most critically acclaimed comic book movie at that point (and probably still today!), yet I don’t remember Iron-Man being dimissed as “KIDDIE CRAP” at the time or anyything. People seemed to enjoy both and understand that there’s more than one way to do a comic book movie!

You get references comic book NERDS would notice like S.H.I.E.L.D. appearing (Clark Gregg good) and a mention of the Ten Rings terrorist group, but neither of those things would put off non-comic readers as they’re perfectly understandle within the context of the movie itself. And if you stayed for the end credit scene and didn’t know what the fuck “The Avengers” are, you’d still probably think “oh cool, it’s Samuel L. Jackson, I like him” and look forward to seeing what this leads to in the future.

So watching it back, yeah I think it holds up well as a good movie. What I did notice, especially in like the frist third, is that it doesn’t really look like anything special cinematically. I haven’t rewatched The Dark Knight for a while but I’m fairly certain it was a lot more visually impressive than Iron Man. The stuff in the cave at the start stood out as looking quite cheap, and also dragged a bit (until he built his first suit and started killing terrorists.) Of course these days they’d just film all that stuff in The Volume and insert a digital cave backdrop later so who’s to say that would be better.

Where the money shows though is on the actual Iron Man suits themselves. They absolutely nailed that and most of the suit stuff still holds up as looking good today. Sure there’s not as much CGI action stuff here as in later films, but that works in the movie’s favour. There’s not a million CGI heroes running around, so we just focus on the one. The Iron Man suit feels special. They take time to show every stage in its construction. We get montages. We get Tony flying for the first time (without the helmet on) and you will believe a man can fly with repulsor technology. There’s multiple scenes of Tony suiting up and they rule. It’s the kind of thing I think is missing a bit from some of the later movies. The movie makes being Iron Man look cool as fuck and that’s important for fans of looking cool as fuck!



Even when it’s obviously all CGI and there’s nobody actually in the suit, the movie never loses track of Tony as a character. You still get a sense of his personality through the special effect.

Which brings me to probably the single most important thing about this movie and the thing probably most responsible for its success: the casting of Robert Downey Jr. as Tony Stark. It’s absolutely perfect casting. Tony, as a character, starts off pretty unlikable in a lot of ways. He’s a womanising arms-dealer and kind of a prick! But he never feels like a cartoon thanks to RDJ. You want to watch him even before you like him. I can’t really stress enough how important he is to this movie and the entire future of the MCU! Director Jon Favreau deserves a ton of credit for fighting to have RDJ cast in the movie. Marvel didn’t want him because they thought he was too much of a risk due to his previous personal problems. He got paid less for the movie than Terrence Howard (who?) It’s almost impossible to imagine anyone else in the role now.

Gwyneth Paltrow may be a crazy nut who grows candles in her vagina or whatever, but she’s real good too and has a nice easy chemistry with RDJ. This scene is really sweet!



Villain Problem?

A criticism of the MCU movies, especially the early ones, is that they lack strong villain characters. And that the villains are most often just dark mirrors of the heroes with limited screentime. And that would be an accurate description of Obadiah Stane in this movie. Literally down to having a big evil black version of the Iron Man suit. AND YET, I don’t think it’s a problem here at all. The movie is all about Tony Stark and his character growth. He’s in almost every scene. Stane’s part is relatively small, but he’s used perfectly for Tony’s character development. It helps that Jeff Bridge’s is a great actor and gives a really menacing, snarling villain performance. Like yeah, they could have had him in the Iron Monger suit a bit longer (I imagine it was down to the more modest budget) as he dies basically five minutes after putting it on but he’s still a lot of fun.



Things that have aged but not necessarily badly.

This movie is old now (fiften years!) There’s things in it you wouldn’t see in the later MCU, for better or worse. Here are some of those things!

It’s weird seeing the “Paramount Pictures” logo at the start. Marvel Studios was an idendependent studio not owned by Disney at this point! They were the underdogs!
The words “Kunar Prvince, Afghanistan” appearing on screen right at the start feels a bit weird now. Today’s MCU would have used some fictional country and not referenced the real world War on Terror.
Tony mentions “Myspace” and I’m not sure that was even still a thing in 2008.
The Pepper “taking out the trash” scene with the reporter Tony sleeps with actually has aged very badly and was probably bad at the time too.
Tony is funny and sarcastic but he isn’t really quipy and maybe MCU movies don’t need to be totally full of quips!
Director Jon Favreau has a cameo role as Tony’s bodygard “Happy” Hogan, but it’s a blink and you’ll miss it part here. He has like two lines! He’s super thin! You probably wouldn’t even recognise him as the same charater who would go on to have a supporting role in a trilogy of Spider-Man movies a decade later.

Ranking.

It’s a good movie. Even watching completely apart from the MCU it holds up as entertaining. I will say again that I thought the first part in the cave dragged a bit. I remember the first time I watched the movie it took me a while to get into. The stuff between Tony and the doctor he’s held captive with in the cave doesn’t grab me the way it should. But once Tony gets back to America I was thoroughly invested, and as I said above all the stuff with him creating the suits is great. He has an actual clear character acrc throughout the movie and it’s not muddy or confused at all like some later ones might be. I like the movie! So I’m taking the CONTROVERSIAL decision to rank it in FIRST PLACE out of all the MCU movies I’ve watched so far in this thread!

NEXT TIME: Oh a Hulk movie came out the same year huh.
 

CaptainWacky

I want to smell dark matter
The Incredible Hulk

Directed by Louis Leterrier

Written by Zak Penn

Released June 8th 2008



Just one month after Iron Man came the second entry into the MCU. I wonder if they were thinking maybe some people would like one more than the other? Maybe they were expecting IRON-FANS and HULKAMANIACS to debate which was better. TIH also came five years after Ang Lee’s divisive Hulk movie, and while it’s definitely a reboot it kind of acts a bit like it’s a sequel by skipping the origin story and starting with Bruce in the same place he was at the end of that movie. So that’s all a bit confusing! Is the movie any good though?

It's okay I guess? It exists? It’s not bad? I feel like I’m going to struggle to find things to say here because the movie just isn’t that interesting. It starts with a montage during the opening credits explaining how Bruce became the Hulk. Turns out he injected himself with what we’ll later learn is the super soldier serum, and right away I think they’ve made a mistake. The whole gamma bomb origin is kind of silly, sure, but it’s also iconic and having him transform into the Hulk for the first time with a nuclear explosion in the background would have been a far more interesting start to the movie. Bruce is played by Edward Norton, who is undoubtedly a good actor but his performance here isn’t a patch on RDJ as Tony Stark. I’m not saying he has to be all flashy and witty like Stark, but his Bruce here is just kind of…a guy. He never really feels that much like he’s struggling with a raging green monster inside, which I think is really the biggest problem with the movie…

So the Hulk himself. The big green guy. If you’re making a Hulk movie, you’ve got to get him right. So what do we get here? The Hulk is in three sequences. In the first we don’t get a good look at him because it’s inside a dark and moody Brazilian bottling factory. The idea being that he’s more scary if he’s some unseen monster stalking Brazilian bullies. I don’t really think it works though. The Hulk is really big! He smashes things! He’s not a slasher movie villain. The scene just kind of comes across like they’re trying to save money by not showing the Hulk much, or that they don’t have confidence in the CGI. But then the next time he appears it’s in broad daylight fighting some army guys and there’s no hiding him. This movie came out in 2008, and I think at the time the Hulk’s look was fairly well received (certainly better than the reaction to how he looked in the Ang Lee movie.) Watching it now though he just kind of looks like a cartoon. It’s hard not to think about the much bettere version coming in just a couple of years. It doesn’t help that even the college backdrop in this army fight scene looks fake. I guess they couldn’t find one that looked just right to film in front of? The final time we see the Hulk it’s in a big video game style fight with another CGI monster and this actually works the best out of the three Hulk scenes. Because Hulk and the Abomination are both CGI it looks like they’re really hitting each other and the fight has some fun moments like Hulk using a car as boxing gloves and doing his hand clap sonic boom thing.

It occurs to me, though, that at no point does Bruce transform into the Hulk out of anger. The first time is self defence, the second is because the army force him to turn, and the last is to save the city. The movie seems a bit reluctant to show Banner/Hulk as a force of unctrollable rage. Like yeah he does blow up a load of tanks and stuff but it doesn’t seem like hs actually kills any of the army guys (the one he squashes conveniently has super powers.) Maybe they didn’t want to risk alienating the audience by making Bruce too scary or something. There is one nice cute scene where he can’t have sex with Betty because if his heart beats too fast he might transform. (Sadly I can’t find a youtube clip of it! The MCU was still allowed to be horny in 2008!)

Betty is played by Liv Tyler, who I think does a good job with what she’s given. She has decent chemistry with Ed Norton and they have a couple of nice scenes together. She is basically just there to help Bruce though and doesn’t really get much with her asshole army dad (William Hurt) beyond the surface level “I’m doing this to protect you!” “You’re doing this FOR YOU!” stuff.

Villain Problem?

Tim Roth plays Emil Blonsky (The Abomnination) and is good at what he’s given. I mean he does a good tortured look and a good “GIVE ME MORE POWER” type speech. I guess the parrallel with Bruce is that Bruce wants to get rid of his rage power while Blonsky just wants more? But they don’t get any scenes together as humans and Blonsky is really just here to fight. And the Abomination fight scene is pretty decent so I guess he serves his purpose well enough.

Hurt is just generic army hardass, and again he’s at least well cast in the role. There’s also Tim Blake Nelson as Samuel Sterns (who we’ll finally see as super villain The Leader in 2024!) as a kind of comic relief kind of bad guy. He feels a bit out of place when he first appears, but it’s good to have a character with a bit of personality even if that personality is pretty goofy. There’s a few other nice light moments like Bruce buying stretchy purple pants and I like the part where they play the “Lonely Man” theme from the old tv series.



There’s a post credit scene with Tony Stark talks to Thunderbolt Ross in a bar…wait. This isn’t post credit! They just stuck it on the end of the movie to make sure everyone saw RDJ. It’s weird and doesn’t end up leading anywhere. Stark feels pretty subdued during it too so it’s not even really worth watching on youtube if you like him.

Ranking.

Well it’s second place, obviously. The movie is fine, I didn’t feel embarrassed wathing it or anything, but there’s really not a huge compelling reason to ever watch it unless you’re doing a thread where you rate every MCU movie.

NEXT TIME: Iron Man! Again! That’s bound to be good!
 

SAUSAGEMAN

Registered User
i've only seen gwyneth in the avengers movies and yeah she's been fantastic in those

And that the villains are most often just dark mirrors of the heroes with limited screentime. And that would be an accurate description of Obadiah Stane in this movie.
has this stopped idk the last things i saw were wandavision and hawkeye.
 

CaptainWacky

I want to smell dark matter
Shang-Chi was the most recent one where I remember thinking the villain was more interesting than the main character (I'll get it it in about eleven months.)
 

CaptainWacky

I want to smell dark matter
Iron Man 2

Directed by Jon Favreau

Written by Justin Theroux

Released May 7th 2010



No MCU movies in 2009. That probably DIDN’T feel weird at the time! Did they even call it the MCU yet? Probably not! Two years after Iron Man we got the sequel and I’m sure expectations were high. You’d expect it to be at least as good as the first and hopefully better. It starts off pretty decent with a montage of villain Ivan Vanko (Mickey Rourke) creating his own arc reactor to power his EVIL WHIPS. Tony Stark does a big speech about “privatising world peace” and he’s still kind of an asshole but likable thanks to RDJ. The US government want access to his Iron Man armour because they’ve failed to creat their own through weapons contractor Justin Hammer (Sam Rockwell.) This is all fine as set up! The first action comes in Monaco during the famous Grand Prix, with Tony in a racear (because he’s an asshole!) being attacked by Whiplash. There’s some cool slow motion shots of cars being chopped in half. Pepper (SKI GODDESS GWYNETH PALTROW) and Happy (a slightly larger role for Jon Favreau this time) deliver his suit to him, and it’s like a suitcase that transforms into the Iron Man suit and that’s pretty cool too! Vanko reveals that Tony’s father Howard stole the design from Vanko’s father and ruined his life. Again, this is all good set up…

Then nothing happens for the rest of the movie.

I mean, not literally nothing but nothing with any impact. There’s a whole big subplot about Tony being slowly poisoned and pushing the people he cares about away because he thinks he’s going to die. This could be good drama but it’s not really! It really just amounts to one scene of him getting drunk and throwing a party. Comics Tony is an alcholic and they could have adapted that storyline in some way (imagine battling a super villain..while battling your own demons!) but all we get is him pissing in his suit while drunk (OH BUT SHE-HULK TWERKING DISGRACED THE MCU, EH?) The only action between the Monaco scene and the climax is a comedy fight between Tony and Rhodey when Rhodey puts on an old Iron Man suit. Rhodes then basically steals the suit and delivers it to the US army, a thing Tony was pretty explicit about not wanting to happen. Rhodes then acts confused when the army want to reproduce it but what the fuck was he expecting. Tony has this big long sidequest trying to find a NEW ELEMENT that will stop his poisoning. It just so happens that his father created the exact NEW ELEMENT Tony requires thirty five years ago but didn’t tell anyone because he didn’t think the world was ready for it. Instead he leaves a message to Tony in the outtakes of an old filmstrip, explaining that the key to creating the element lies in the model of the 1974 Stark Expo for some reason! Because Howard knew that his then four year old son would grow up to be a genius and be able to create this element. And that he would happen to watch this old filmstrip. And that the model of the Stark Expo would still be lying under a sheet in Pepper’s new office. All we get out of this really is Tony learning that his dad really did care about him but I don’t really care!

There’s also a bunch of people in the movie who possibly don’t need to be there! Samuel L. Jackson returns as Nick Fury for a slightly expanded role, but all we really get out of it is a cool shot of Tony sitting in a giant doughnut. I guess Fury’s the one who somehow knows Howard created a NEW ELEMENT which he kept secret but it would have been fine if Tony had found this out himself. There’s a completely pointless, wheel-spinning scene at the end where he decides Tony is NOT ready to be one of The Avengers yet and in universe this is really silly because the only two Avengers Fury has at this point is the hot girl who does lucha moves and the guy who shoots arrows and that’s probably not enough to save the world!

The hot girl is Scarlett Johnasson as Natasha Romanoff/Black Widow and I’m calling her “the hot girl” because that’s pretty much all her part in the movie is. Favreau apparently loved shooting her ass even more than Joss Whedon did (literally the first time we see her in the Black Widow costume it’s a shot of her ass) which is certainly an achievement. And like it’s fine to do “look how hot she is!” to some extent (especailly since she gets her undercover job with Tony by being hot. Also I find her hot and I’m lonely) but there has to be at least some hint of character to her and there really isn’t. She gets one fight scene with a load of mooks which is, to be fair, more fun than the actual climactic action scene of the movie but also something that wouldn’t be out of place in an episode of Buffy.

Coulson also returns for literally no other reason than to say “right, I’m off to New Mexico to be in Thor!” in his second scene. There’s a post credit scene with him saying “right, I’m in New Mexico to be in Thor!” too but that’s what post credit scenes are for so I’m fine with that part at least.

The big action at the end felt seriously underwhelming. Tony and Rhodes fight some Iron Man suit drones, but they never feel in any danger and it’s really routine and not at all exciting. There’s one kind of cool bit when Tony just chops all the drons up with his lightsaber repulsors, but that’s it. Then Vanko shows up (in his own EVIL Iron Man suit of course) with BIGGER WHIPS and surely this will be the good part? Not really! They beat him in about a minute. He barely says anything before they do. There’s absolutely no emotional pay-off to his earlier claims that Howard Stark ripped off his dad. Tony doesn’t care and Vanko has seemingly stopped caring too. It’s a complete nothing of a climax. Tony kisses Pepper, gets a medal from Garry Shandling and that’s it. Nothing happens that could possibly make you feel anything.

Villain Problem?

Mickey Rourke was fresh off an Oscar nomination for The Wrestler, but he plays Vanko with a silly accent and the character is lacking in depth. Maybe the idea is that he has a good motive for being angry at Tony after what the Stark family did to the Vanko family but he doesn’t come across sympathetic at all. He’s just kind of silly! It doesn’t help that he spends like half his screentime talking about a bird for some reason?

There’s another villain though…



Sam Rockwell as Justin Hammer is the brightest bright spot to the movie. The problem is that Hammer as a character is just kind of pathetic and not much of a rival for Tony. His weapons don’t work properly and he isn’t even particularly evil, just greedy and dumb. Because Whiplash is the fight scene bad guy Hammer is just…arrested at the end of the movie. Rockwell does his best and gets some laughs with his comedy material, and I’d certainly like to see him again in a bigger role, but he isn’t enough to save the movie.

OTHER THINGS

Rhodes is now played by Don Cheadle, probably because Terrence Howard got overpaid for the first movie and they wanted him to pay him less here and Howard bailed. There’s also a gross racial element with the hated then Marvel CEO Ike Perlmutter (who gets blamed for everything bad about early MCU movies…and seemingly deserves it in many cases!) claimined that it was fine to replace the actor because “all black people look alike.” I like Cheadle in the role but the recasting definitely makes it feel like Rhodes is a different character from the first movie. Also, while it’s not okay that he got screwed over, I would like to point out that Terrence Howard is insane.



Elon Musk has a cameo in the Monaco scene, for some reason. Maybe he bought his way into the movie. I don’t think I knew who he was in 2010 but it’s weird watching it now and thinking “oh it’s that git.”

I can’t think of any more other things.

Ranking.

It’s in last place. The Incredible Hulk might be a bit dull and unadventerous but this is dull and actually a bit bad! It hints at some storylines that could have potential then doesn’t live up to that potential at all. And it’s not like the action is good enough to make up for it, other than some nice car-slicing. I guess I could see someone enjoying it more than TIH just based on RDJ being more entertaining to watch than Ed Norton but for me this is dead last and may well be in that spot for a long time!

NEXT TIME: Thor! Starring Coulson apparently!
 
Last edited:

CaptainWacky

I want to smell dark matter
Thor

Directed by Kenneth Branagh

Screenplay by Ashley Edward Miller, Zack Stentz and Don Payne

Story by J. Michael Straczynski and Mark Protosevich

Released May 6th 2011



Thor seems like he’d be a difficult character to get right on screen. An actual Norse God coming to Earth with a magic hammer, that could be hard to relate to! Iron Man really worked because of Tony Stark as a character played perfectly by Robert Downey Jr. - and everyone knows at least know the general idea with The Incredible Hulk, even if the movie was mediocre. With Thor,there needs to be a relatable humanity to the character but you also have to respect the Norse mythology stuff and make sure it doesn’t come across as silly or too campy. You need to think you’re watching someone who could be seen as a God. Marvel went with Kenneth Branagh as director, no doubt hoping he’d bring a certain Shakespearean gravitas to the proceedings. Does the movie work? Yes, at least partially, I’d say! But I think it’s easier to start by talking about the places where I think the movie stumbles a bit…

The film starts with three humans (Natalie Portman! Stellan Skarsgard! Kat Dennings!) running over Thor in New Mexico when he appears seemingly out of nowhere. They wonder where he came from and then it immediately switches to Asgard and we don’t see these three characters again for thirty minutes. We see Thor’s coronation as the new King of Asgard (replacing his father Odin, Anthony Hopkins) interrupted by frost giants, Thor and his friends (including brother Loki, Tom Hiddleston) travelling to FROST GIANT LAND to fight them and nearly starting a war, and Thor being exiled to Earth and stripped of his powers/magic hammer. This all happens quite fast but it’s well done and fun to watch. Branagh indeed manages to not make the Asgard stuff look too silly, playing it straight while still having fun interactions between the characters so that it doesn’t feel all stuffy. Then we go back to where we started on Earth and there’s a lot of “who is this guy? Surely he can’t really be a Norse God!” stuff. And later there’s a scene where Thor is being questioned by Coulson who’s asking him where he’s from, how he became such a good fighter, etc. And it makes me wonder if they changed the structure of the movie in editing? If it was originally going to start with us on Earth for a while and we’d only see the Asgard stuff in flashback as it went on? Because the audience already knows that Thor is definitely the actual Thor with the magic hammer and everything, and hearing characters keep asking what his deal is gets a bit repetitive.

So there’s two settings here: Asgard and Earth. The stuff on Asgard fares better, but I don’t think either feels fully formed. The New Mexico town could basically be anywhere. It doesn’t have a personality of its own. Thor barely interacts with anyone who lives there, just with the three visiting scientists (well two scientists and whatever Darcy is.) There isn’t even much fish out of water stuff, just the bit where he smashes a cup and say “another!” and a funny bit where he goes into a pet shop and asks to buy a horse. From doing some googling it seems quite a bit of the Earth stuff was cut from the movie, as the woman who works in the “another!” diner was supposed to be a supporting character but doesn’t end up speaking in the movie. With the Asgard stuff, the problem is that Asgard as a place just feels kind of empty. Other than the scene of Thor’s coronation the only people we actually see there are Thor and his friends and family. It does not feel like a place where people actually live and there’s also a bit of a ”the CGI isn’t quite there yet” problem. Having said that though I do generaly enjoy the Asgard parts and there’s some cool visuals during Thor’s climactic fight with Loki and the effect when he travels by the Bifrost is spiffy.

Also the stuff involving S.H.I.E.L.D. could probably have been almost entirely left out. It’s not bad, but it just seems to be there to get to the point where Thor tells Coulson “yes I’ll be in The Avengers next year okay?” They actually make S.H.I.E.L.D. look quite sinister when they steal all Jane’s research, but then Coulson just gives it all back when Thor agrees to be in the crossover spectacular so I’m not sure what they were going for there.

How about Thor as a main character? As I hinted at above, this isn’t a RDJ style blow away performance. I think Chris Hemsworth does well though. He’s handicapped slightly by the fact that they made him dye his eyebrows…



He’s best served by the scene where Loki comes to him on Earth and makes Thor believe he’s responsible for Odin’s death (“can I come home?” is a really well delivered line) and the scenes where he goes out drinking with Selvig (Skarsgard) then star watches with Jane (Portman) afterwards. I feel like we definitely needed like another ten minutes of scenes with him just hanging out with his human friends to devlop those relationships and make Thor feel more like a rounded person. His character arc is okay but a bit clunky in how it’s resolved. He’s stripped of his powers because he runs off like a hot-head and nearly starts a war. He gets his powers back when he is willing to sacrifice himself to save Jane and the others. The two things don’t seem immediately related? I guess you could say by letting the Destroyer kill him he’s showing the kind of responsibility he shirked earlier when he ran off to wrecklessly fight Frost Giants. It kind of works but it could be more satisfying. I think the biggest problem is that nothing that happens to Thor on Earth actually changes him. His trip to Earth is almost irrelevant to his character arc, becaue it’s Loki telling Thor that he killed Oden that really makes Thor think about his actions, and that could have happened anywhere. We should have seen Selvig and especially Jane changing the way Thor looks at things.

So, how about Jane as a character? OBVIOUSLY I’m biased but I think Natalie Portman does a very good job with what she’s given, especially showing her growing crush on Thor. She does really good giggle-acting! I think she and Hemsworth have pretty good chemistry. The problem is I don’t think the movie does much to show why he falls for her? Besides the fact that she looks like Natalie Portman. He seems impressed by her scientific knowledge, but when they kiss and he promises to come back for her it feels like it kind of came from nowhere.

Skarsgard is always good. Kat Dennings does well as the comic relief but the script seems to run out of stuff for her to do by the third act and she just kind of stands around after that. Anthony Hopkins gives the kind of performance you’d expect as Odin, and that’s a good thing because if you want an Anthony Hopkins-like performance you might as well cast Anthony Hopkins. There’s also the Warriors Three and Sif who all basically have one character trait each, but it’s nice that Thor has some friends. Idris Elba looks cool as Heimdall but doesn’t have much to do. Rene Russo plays Thor and Loki’s mother Figga and has literally six lines in the whole movie. I’m assuming this is another case where a lot of her scenes was cut. Is there anyone else in the movie…oh!

Villain problem?

Villain SOLUTION. Tom Hiddleston as Loki is not only the best villain yet but the best developed character in this movie and up there with Tony Stark as the best character to appear so far in the MCU. He does the comic book villain thing very well, certainly, but he also has actual well written motivations and is sympathetic in places! There’s a part where, after Odin has gone to sleep (he’s old!), Loki makes a deal with his REAL DAD the Frost Giant king to help them invade Asgard. But then when the Frost Giants arrive Loki actually just kills them all and reveals it was a plot to impress his dad! Then attempts genocide to impress his dad even more, which is going too far but you still get why he’s doing it! And it’s interesting that he’s perfectly fine with leaving Thor alive, in exile on Earth up until it becomes possible that Thor could return to Asgard and threaten him. Hiddleston’s still playing the character twelve years later in his own spin-off show which should tell you one thing: this guy is good at plaiyng this character!



OTHER THINGS

The first version of the script by Mark Protosevich, way back in 2006, saw Thor exiled to Earth in Viking times, featured a million characters and would have cost far too much money to ever film. J. Michael Straczynski was later brought in to rework it and I’m assuming it was he who changed the setting to a small town in present day America. His run on the Thor comic saw Asgard relocated to a small town and you can kind of see a little of that in the movie. I’m not sure how much of his writing ended up making it to the screen (the other writers were brought in to rework it again once Branagh was hired) but he does get a cameo in the movie as one of the people who unsuccessfully attempts to lift Thro’s hammer. So that was probably nice for him!

Post credit scene sees Selvig meeting with Nick Fury and it’s reveal that Selving has seemingly been possessed by Loki. This scene was directed by Joss Whedon as it ties directly into his Avengers movie, though it doesn’t actually exactly line-up with the events of that film (where it’s more like Selvig has been brainwashed by Loki’s EVIL STONE.) But hey it’s good that Loki’s still alive.

Here's a really cool shot of Odin on an eight-legged horse.

eF7dmE9.gif


Ranking.

Despite some criticism, I do like the movie! While I enjoy the later more comedic Thor (up to a point, anyway…) I appreciate how Branagh treats the Asgard stuff seriously here. There’s comedy but it’s never making fun of the characters or setting. And the movie is never boring or dull (unlike the last two!) and if anything ends up feeling too short. Like, yeah, it could have been done better in several ways I identified above (SHOULD HAVE HIRED ME, MARVEL) but it’s good, I like it. Not as much as Iron Man, though. So it’s in second place!

NEXT TIME: Before The Avengers there was The FIRST Avenger!
 

StarMan™

Active Member
I liked Thor. Portman and Hemsworth were great together, Hiddleston was fantastic and Hopkins added that air of legitimacy to the fantastical setting.
 

CaptainWacky

I want to smell dark matter
And they mentioned Facebook for the first time so I guess Myspace was dead by now in MCU canon.
 

CaptainWacky

I want to smell dark matter
Captain America: The First Avenger

Directed by Joe Johnston

Screenplay by Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely

Released 22 July 2011



For various reasons, there are people all over the world who do not like the United States of America. So a movie where a guy literally named “CAPTAIN AMERICA” travels the world punching people while wearing an American flag might not go down well! The movie rarely shifts away from Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) so it’s really banking on you actually enjoying watching this Captain America guy. Happily, the movie gets the character completely right. Rather than going around preaching how great America is whatever people feared, Steve Rogers is just a plucky guy who doesn’t like bullies. He stands for the idealised version of what American should stand for. The movie begins in 1942, and Steve is just a weedly little guy! The special effect used to turn Chris Evans into a weedy little guy is impressive, but still not completely convincing. Evans’ head and voice just don’t feel like they belong on that body. What the movie does right, probably the most important thing it does right, is show that Steve has the heart of a hero from the start. The early training scene where he dives on the (fake) grenade is perfect, and the scene with the excellent Stanley Tucci afterwards a highlight. The super soldier fromula given to him just helps him become who he was always meant to be.



Since I brought up Stanley Tucci (in a small but memorable role), I’ll mention that the casting is pretty strong all over. Hayley Atwell as Peggy Carter is the best female character to appear in the MCU at this point; she’s so good they continue to bring her back as different versions of the characters over a decade later (and got her own spin-off show! Remember that!) We get Tommy Lee Jones in a “Tommy Lee Jones” type role (similar to Anthony Hopkins in Thor: why not just get the real thing if you can afford him!) Sebastian Stan makes his first of many appearances as Bucky Barnes but is kind of lacking in screentime (more on this later!) It’s weird to see him playing a normal guy. Dominic Cooper plays a younger version of Howard Stark, Toby Jones gives a fun performance as cowardly Hydra scentist Armin Zola, and Neal McDonough is more perfect casting as impressively-moustached Dum Dum Duggan (but another who could use more screentime.) I’ll get to the other main character later…

So the structure of the movie: as I said above it starts with establishing Steve’s character before giving him powers, and this is all good. After getting his powers he’s not trusted to actually fight in the war and instead does USO shows where he punches Hitler for a while, and we get the “star-spangled man with a plan” song so that’s fun. But it means all the actual war stuff is a bit rushed? We get the big scene of Steve rescuing Bucky and the other characters (there’s a black guy! An English guy! An Asian American guy!) but then the movie just hits fast forward. It covers years(?) in a montage of Cap bringing down Hydra facilities. It’s a very fun montage for sure, and I’d kind of like a whole movie of it…



…but it’s followed by the scene where Bucky “dies” falling off a cliff but it feels like it’s just been five minutes since he was rescued? And as good as the Steve/Peggy stuff is (it’s quite good!) I think this also suffers from the unclear timeframe. He kisses Natalie Dormer and then they don’t talk for…months? I think? He couldn’t explain what happened in all that time?

In terms of action it’s just kind of good enough? I mean there’s some nice shots of Cap throwing his shield or Peggy shooting a gun and stuff. There’s a bit where Cap rides his motorcycle into Hydra Central that’s quite good. But there’s not much in the way of fight scenes. You get a punch or two or a raygun firing then it cuts away to something else. The final fight between Cap and the Red Skull is completely forgettable. Which adds to…

Villain problem?

Hugo Weaving as the Red Skull seems like very good casting. Imagine Agent Smith but he’s red and a Nazi, sounds good! It’s not as good as that. Weaving is pretty good with what he’s given, but he hated the make-up he had to wear and never came back, so maybe his performance isn’t all it could have been. The bigger problem is that the character just isn’t evil enough here? Like, yeah, he kills a lot of people and wants to blow up a load of cities (for some reason) but they really shy away from the whole Nazi thing, which is weird for a movie set during World War 2. Maybe they were worrying about the movie flopping in Germany. There’s a bit in the movie where Hitler basically kicks Hyra out of the Nazi Party because he doesn’t like Skull having red skin (or so Skull says)? After that it’s not really clear what Hydra believe beyond “kill everyone!” Skull has some vague speech about super-powered people being the real superior race, but him and Cap are the only actual super-powered individuals at this time and that’s not enough for a whole race. There’s also not enough scenes of Cap and Red Skull together.

Thankfully the underrated tv show Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. was much more direct on the subject of Hydra and Nazis.

OK0xl9U
I8HmZOf.gif


OTHER THINGS

Some funny cating notes! A pre-Doctor Who Jenna (Louise) Coleman plays Bucky’s date when he and Steve go out with two girls. Natalie Dormer has a small but memorable role as the sexually charged Private Lorraine. Laura Haddock plays a girl who asks for Captain America’s autograph (and possibly slept with him, if you think she’s the girl Banner was talking about in She-Hulk) and would go on to play Peter Quill’s mother in the Guardians movies. Kenneth Choi who plays one of the Howling Commandos goes on to play a teacher in the MCU Spider-Man films.

I really like the final scene with Cap waking up in 2011 and meeting Nick Fury and am happy it wasn’t relegated to the post credits spot. The bittersweet “I had a date” line really works because we can all imagine how crushing it would be to have a date with Hayley Atwell coming up then wake up seventy years in the future.

Ranking.

It’s not as good as Iron-Man, but I think it’s pretty close between this and Thor for second place. In some ways Thor is a bit more adventurous, whereas TFA kind of plays it save. And Thor certainly has a stronger villain. But I think Thor stumbles in bigger ways than this does, and, mostly importantly, I think CA:TFA does its main character better than Thor. It really nails everything about Steve and especially the scene of him turning into Captain America. I also like the whole look of the futuristic technology meets World War 2 stuff a lot. So I’m putting this in SECOND PLACE.

NEXT TIME: I will get The Avengers and you will be avenged.
 

CaptainWacky

I want to smell dark matter
The Avengers

Directed by Joss Whedon

Screenplay by Joss Whedon

Story by Joss Whedon and Zak Penn

Released May 4th 2012



Joss Whedon. It would be hard to talk about this movie without talking about him a bit. He is someone who has created a lot of art which I greatly enjoy (spoiler: including this movie) and a lot of stuff that has meant a lot to me (Buffy, I’m talking about Buffy.) He is also, by many accounts, not a very nice person. He’s done some bad shit. For a while I kind of just ignored this. “Well, nobody’s perfect but his tv stuff is still good!” But more and more stuff came out and it became clear his bad side went beyond just cheating on his wife a lot (which is also bad.) I’m not going to recap everything here, you can look it up if you want reminded. I got the point where I didn’t really want to see anything new from him ever again. But what about his past worrk? How do I feel rewatching that now? I…still enjoy it? I’d never be able to think of Buffy as anything less than one of the greatest and most influential tv shows of all time. And there were a lot of other people working on that show besides Joss, so it’s not like I’m constantly thinking “BAD JOSS DID THIS AND NOW IT’S SPOILED, FUCK” when I’m rewatching it. I can understand if other people feel differently, if all his past work is ruined for them. There are definitely valid critical looks you can take at his work. Myself, I’m not really interested in going back and looking at something he did twenty years ago and saying “wow this is proof that he was racist/sexist/sleeping with that Potential Slayer actress.” Maybe there is stuff you can spot, but I think having the knowledge we have now would influence me and I’d be looking for stuff that isn’t actually there. So I’m not really interested in looking at this movie through the lens of modern Whedon criticism, trying to look for moments where the camera lingers on ScarJo’s bum as “evidence” that Joss was evil all along. I’m just trying to rank every MCU movie in order of goodness, I don’t feel like doing anything more than that. For the record I haven’t seen any reports of him acting unprofressionally when shooting this movie, but that makes sense when you consider it was the biggest thing he’d done at this point. Of course he’d be on his best behaviour. So yes, Joss is definitely not a good guy and doesn’t deserve a Hollywood comeback, but I’m not going to pretend he wasn’t hugely talented at one time and that this movie isn’t any good. And hey if you want to see me being more critical of a Joss Whedon superhero movie, I will get to Age of Ultron eventually!

I remember there being a feeling of surprise when Joss was announced as the movie’s director. This movie was really, really important to Marvel! A crossover of their first five films, something that hadn’t really been done before (yes I know there were movies where Godzilla fought Dracula and Frankenstein or whatever, but this was bigger.) It had to be their biggest movie yet for the MCU to have a chance to continue on. Maybe we’d still have gotten Iron Man sequels but I doubt we would have gotten much else if this was a flop. So you’d think they’d want a director who could make it really spectacular, someone with blockbuster experience. Whedon’s only previous feature film had been Serenity, which was well received but flopped at the box office. He was best known for his tv work. So were people right to be worried? Well, no; the movie was a huge hit and it turns out Joss Whedon was absolutely the right person to direct it (with some reservations, see below!) But, more importantly than that, he was also the perfect person to write it.

Zak Penn wrote an early draft of the script, but when Whedon was brought in to direct he rewrote the script completely and claims that nothing of Penn’s mad it into the movie. Penn disputes this, but the script really does feel like pure Whedon to me. It’s a pretty simple story: the Avengers are brought together to stop an alien invastion. They clash with each other at first but ultimately come together as a team and win the day. Simple, but very satisfying! While this is a crossover of the previous five movies, there were likely to be many people watching it who hadn’t seen those movies, so there are introductions to all the characters. They’re quite brief though! Tony activates a new clean energy thing, establishing that he’s a rich smart guy who uses his powers for good. We get a nice scene with him and Pepper (a more casual Pepper than we’ve seen before, WITH BARE FEET) which also introduces Coulson, who gets some quick character background too. Whedon is (OR WAS, I KNOW HE'S BAD NOW) REALLY GOOD at doing stuff like this. Captain America just gets introduced with some war flashbacks while punching a bag, but his characterisation throughout will tell you all you need to know about him. Black Widow’s Buffy-style introduction scene is far better intro for her than her entire appearance in Iron Man 2. Hawkeye is naturally the least interesting Avenger – just being a guy who shoots fancy arrows – and the movie doesn’t really help make up for that with him spending the first two thirds of it brainwashed. Once he finally gets to shoot those fancy arrows it is actually fun. Thor gets introduced the latest of the main characters, which I think makes sense as he’s the most outlandish and you have to ground the movie with the guy in the iron suit and the super soldier from World War 2 first. This Thor is pretty similar to Branagh’s but does get a few comedy one-liners (“he’s adopted”) which Hemsorth delivers well. Then there’s Bruce Banner/The Hulk, now played by Mark Ruffalo. So for the second time in the MCU we’re inroducing a new version of that character, and for the third time in under a decade. Luckily Whedon and Ruffalo totally nail it and Hulk is one of the strongest parts of the movie. We get the scary version of Hulk, which is sold by Black Widow being terrified of him and it’s far better than a blurry Hulk we can varely see roughing guys up in a bottling factory. Then later we get the heroic version of Hulk too in the big third act extravaganza and he’s far far more satisfying there than the 2008 version too (it helps that the CGI is much improved.)

cWY4XDE.gif


Before we get to that extravaganza, we have to talk about how the movie looks. Movies are a visual medium, after all! The big criticism is that the movie looks bland, that Whedon shoots it like a tv show. And I have to say, for the first two thirds anyway, this is pretty accuate. I think I said Iron Man was kind of bland looking, and maybe it is compared to some other blockbusters, but I feel I owe Jon Favreau an apology as he certainly did a much better job making his first Marvel movie look cinematic than Whedon does here (for the first two acts of this anyway.) It gets off to a really weak start with Loki and a brainwashed Hawkeye escaping Nick Fury in a car chase. A very unexciting car chase! The middle of the movie is set on a S.H.I.E.L.D. helicarrier, which of course looks cool when it takes off but Whedon doesn’t do much intersting visually with the characters sitting around talking. There’s a fight scene between Iron Man, Thor and Captain America in a forest which you really want to be good (it’s a fight scene between Iron Man, Thor and Captain America!) but it the forest looks so fake and bad. And Thor’s armour is made out of plastic. The “it looks like a tv show” accusations certainly have merit in these scenes.

But does it actually matter? I mean, obviously it does if you’re analysing the cinematography of the movie. I’m not saying the complaints aren’t valid. But the movie was a huge hit, far beyond the five before it, so cleary it looked good enough to not scare the average person away. Whedon’s writing is good enough to keep you interested even during those “people sititng at a desk” scenes. And where it really matters in the third act, the movie does deliver in spectacle. The big main event here is the battle of New York and it’s super hero team-up on a level that had never been seen on screen before. Yeah you can say “well the X-Men teamed up and fought Magneto on the Statue of Liberty, that was pretty cool!” and maybe it was, but this is better. This is literally a comic come to life. The Avengers fighting aliens in New York is about as classic a Marvel comic scene as you can get and boy does the movie deliver. Whedon is a total nerd who grew up reading these comics and you can tell he was doing stuff here he’d been imagining for decades (and self-censoring his imaginings of male heroes falling on female hereos’ tits, at least for now.) It really elevates the movie into something special – I still remember the childlike joy I felt when watching it in the cinema. It just gets everything right: from the team just standing together looking cool while the camera swirls around, to dramatic slow motion hammer and shield throwing, to the jokes (Hulk pounding Loki into the ground is so perfectly done that it still makes me laugh every time) to the big one shot fight scene…it’s as good as anyone could have hoped. It’s a kind of lightning in the bottle moment that later movies have struggled to recreate. And everyone’s in character and their character stuff results in big spectacular pay-offs like Banner transforming into Hulk and punching a huge space-worm thing all in one motion…it’s really good! And all in broad daylight with clearly visible (good!) CGI! Whedon got it all right here. And I don’t know who else could have done it better at the time. Maybe someone else could have made it look technically more impressive but who could have delivered this marriage of script, character and action better than pre-fall Whedon?



I wouldn’t normally give the mid credits scene its own paragraph. It’s just a fun little bonus thing, right? WRONG, ASSHOLE. Much like the Nick Fury post credits scene from Iron Man, the mid credits appearance by Thanos here is a masterclass in how to do one of those scenes. Thanos is revealed as the real power behind Loki’s invasion, which is obviously going to appeal to comic fans who know who Thaons is and appreciate the “courting death” line. But it works just as well for the normal people who just think “wow who is that purple guy and why is he grinning at the idea of fighting the Avengers!?” It’s the kind of scene teasing the future that works perfectly, doesn’t feel forced, and doesn’t take away any time from anything else in the movie.

Villain Problem?

Tom Hiddleston’s Loki is the main villain again, but he’s a bit different from his previous appearance. He’s a bit more evil, a bit more cartoony. He’s chewing up that scenery. The tortured, more complex Loki of Thor is mostly gone (but you still get the sense he’s in over his head) and I can see some people missing that version, but really he needs to be the way he is for this film to work. He needs to be a straight up bad guy (literally compared to Hitler by an old German at one point!) for The Avengers to get together and kick the shit out of. And Hiddleston is great here, absolutely nailing stuff like calling Natasha a “mewling quim” but still keeping some sense of the same character from Thor. And hey if you want a nerd explanation for his change in behaviour, you can believe that official wiki article or whatever it was which said the mind stone (on his staff) altered his behaviour. It actually makes sense as we see the same stone influencing the Avengers in one scene. But you can also freely ignore that because it’s never been mentioned on screen!

xEf1D4y.gif


OTHER THINGS

Some fun casting notes! Enver Gjokaj plays a New York cop – he previously starred in Whedon’s kind of good show Dollhouse and would go on to return to the MCU as Daniel Sousa in Agent Carter and Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.. Oh, and if you thought Agent Coulson was dead in this movie, you’d be wrong(ish)! He was ressurcted to star in AOS but the canon-status of that show is questionable due to later seasons not really fitting! It’s good though (mostly!) Alexis Denisof, who played Wesley in Whedon’s Buffy The Vampire Slayer and its spin-off Angel, plays Thanos’ Mouth of Sauron lookalike underling. Harry Dean Stanton has a cameo as an old man who sees Hulk fall through the sky and talks to a naked Bruce Banner. Ashley Johnson plays a waitress who flirted with Steve Rogers in a scene cut from the movie (she still gets some close-ups in the Battle of New York and a couple of lines.) Cobie Smulders makes her debut as Agent Maria Hill and hopefully she’ll eventually get a bigger part (spoiler: she doesn’t.)

This scene isn’t in the movie but maybe it should be:



I haven’t said much about the music in any of these movies yet. Maybe that’s a damning indictment of how said music isn’t very memorable (though I would say Captain America had some good stuff.) But the Avengers theme (by Alan Silvestri) is another very important component of the Battle of New York scene. It just screams SUPERHEROES TEAMING UP at you.



Ranking.

I’m pretty sure it’s number one. Like yeah it doesn’t start off that great. It drags a bit. It doesn’t look as good as it should in a lot of places. But the stuff it gets right is the most important stuff and it really gets that stuff right. You could argue that Iron Man is a better movie but as an MCU movie this is the best so far and yeah it’s number one.

NEXT TIME: The last Iron Man movie ever.
 
Last edited:

CaptainWacky

I want to smell dark matter
Iron Man 3

Directed by Shane Black

Screenplay by Shane Black and Drew Pearce

Released May 3rd 2013



A year after The Avengers, the MCU returned with the third Iron Man movie. Its task is to conclude the Iron Man trilogy of movies, while also leaving Tony Stark in a position where he can appear in future Avengers movies. In fact I think at the time this was made Robert Downey Jr. hadn’t actually signed up for Avengers 2, so this really has to serve as some kind of ending. Jon Favreau is OUT as director (but still plays Happy Hogan, who feels more like a proper character now), replaced by Shane Black. Will it be better than Iron Man 2 or will it be COMPLETE SHIT? Well, I think it’s good! I like it! But some people disagreed, for reasons I suppose I have to go over later...

I will say that under Black’s direction the movie is maybe less bombastic than Favreau’s movies? There’s not so much rock music or dancing girls. It feels like they let Black do his own thing: the movie’s set at Christmas (a lot of Black’s movies are), it opens with narration from Tony Stark, there’s a bit where he tells a child to stop being a “pussy”..look, I’m not saying it’s a huge departure but you can tell it’s made by different people. What it does very well is deal with Tony Stark’s state of mind after the events of The Avengers. He feels unsafe and has built a load of new Iron Man suits. He has panic attacks and retreats to his suit to feel better. And the movie takes the suit away from him (in a slightly contrived way!) so that he has to face his problems head on. It’s good stuff, far better than whatever the fuck was going on in Iron Man 2. The middle part of the movie has Tony teamed up with a kid and it works pretty well. The last third has him teamed up with Rhodey and it works really well; it's a shame they never really get to have fun together after this.

Before I go on to other things, I would also like to note how good this scene was:



A superhero actually saving people in a superhero movie! That’s the kind of thing we should see more of. Plus they shot it with actual skydivers and it looks so much better than some of the all-CGI flying stuff we see in more recent movies.

Another thing we can all agree on: Gwyneth Paltrow’s stomach:



Villain problem?

Well, maybe. Some people would violently say there is. A lot of people hated this movie and most of that hate seems to be down to the twist the movie plays with the villain. We are led to believe that the main bad guy is the terrorist The Mandarin, played by the great Ben Kingsley. As it turns out, Kingsley really plays an actor named Trevor who has been hired to play a boogyeman villain by the movie’s real big bad: Guy Pearce as Aldrich Killian (with help from Rebecca Hall as Maya Hansen, but more on her below!) This is a reveal which, in my opinion, makes perfect sense for the story the movie is telling…but man, some people HATED it! It’s the first MCU movie with a crazy FAN BACKLASH from people who wanted to see the actual Mandarin in the movie. Now, I do have some sympathy with people who wanted to see Ben Kingsley play the main villain of the movie. Because look at this trailer…



Ben Kingsley is awesome and would have given an awesome villain performance. In fact he DOES give an awesome performance as Trevor acting at the Mandarin…which I guess in canon means that Trevor is a brilliant actor. So yeah, I get it, to some degree. But people who wanted to see the original 1964 stereotypical Fu Manchu “yellow peril” type Mandarin on screen? I have no sympathy for them. And really how could they have accepted that in 2013?

While the twist does work for the story of the movie (and the reveal of Trevor’s true nature is hilarious), there are still problems with Killian. Guy Pearnce (of Amazon Freevee’s Neighbours) is a good actor and give a fine performance, but Killian himself is kind of dull (before he finally goes full nuts at the end.) He frankly feels like a less interesting version of Iron Man 2’s Justin Hammer, but in a much better movie. I think part of the problem comes from changes made before (and possibly during) filming. Director Shane Black has told that originally Maya Hansen would have been the main villain of the movie, but Marvel (THAT DAMN IKE PERLMUTTER) didn’t want a female villain as they thought they’d be unable to sell action figures based on a female character (wtf.) So rather than one of Tony’s ex-girlfriends being the villain we get a guy whose grudge against Tony is that…Tony left him standing on a roof one time. Okay. I think the original plan would have been to have Killian as a romantic rival for Tony, with him kidnapping Pepper and all that still happening, and Tony ultimately facing an extremis-powered Maya in the end. I think that would have been better! But I do like that Pepper is the one to kill Killian. You can kill me any time you want, Gwyneth.

I think another lesser thing people were annoyed by is that Tony spends quite a bit of the movie not wearing the Iron Man suit. But whole point of the movie is that Tony is still Iron Man even without the Iron Man suit, so of course he isn’t going to wear it for a lot of the movie! And like the thing that made the first Iron Man good was how strong Tony’s character story was. It wasn’t just a CGI man flying about (but those parts were good too.) Limiting the suit a bit here means we get fun fight scenes like Tony using homemade gadgets to take out terrorists and a bit where he fights with just one repulser beam and his boot on.



So yeah I don’t think that complaint is valid at all!

Eventually we get to the big CGI finale and it’s pretty decent too. Tony and calls his “Iron Legion” to come fight the extremis mooks with him and Rhodey and if you like seeing a bunch of different Iron Man suits doing a couple of things each then this is the scene for you. We get the forementioned killing of Killian by Pepper and then the movie has to wrap things up in a way that says “well if RDJ signs on for another movie this still kind of works!” Tony’s heart problem is cured by an actor famous in China because they got some money from China for putthing him in this movie. He blows up his Iron Legion and you can take this as him giving up being Iron Man completely. But equally you could take it as him destroying the suits he made during his period of anxiety and conquering his mental health problems. The last line of the movie is still “I am Iron Man” and Tony’s still alive (for now!) so I don’t think it’s that much of a streth that he’d show up again still doing Iron Man things.

OTHER THINGS

The muc missed Miquel Ferrer appears as the Vice President as part of an under-cooked subplot about Killian holding power over the U.S. government. The most interesting part of this is that Ferrer’s character’s one-legged daughter is played by a very young Jenna Ortega! Bring her back to the MCU as a villain with a metal leg, maybe!

I can’t remember much about the score, but what I do remember is the end credits music and the closing titles. It’s possibly no exaggeration to say that this is the greatest end credits sequence in cinema history! Okay, that probably is an exaggeration, but it’s the best one in the MCU for sure. I’m a sucker for credits which have pictures of the characters appear when the actor’s name is on screen so yeah this rules for me. Well done Brian Tyler and the credit making people.



EDIT: EVERY video I can find has playback disabled (I guess the music sets off a copyright thing?) so just click the video lol (nobody will.)
Ranking.

I like this movie, I think that should be clear. I understand the complaints to SOME extent, but I really don’t get people who act like this is awful and one of the worst in the MCU. I think it’s a good, well written, well executed, fun movie! For me the only question is if it’s second behind The Avengers or third behind the original Iron Man. I can definitely see an argument to be made for it being better than the original Iron Man and it does do some things better, but I think the first one is just a bit more impressive. So I’m going a very credible third place ranking for the good movie Iron Man 3!

NEXT TIME: Thor is back! And things are getting dark, apparently.
 
Top