Continuing my MCU rewatch

Damien said:
As an American, would you be comfortable with any man having mind-control-level complete authority over a military force that can destroy all the military of the rest of the world combined at the same time as long as he said he pinky-promised to only use it on outside threats?
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If I had just seen the aliens attack NYC with flying beasts and laser weapons and it seems like we survived out of pure luck due to some super-powered beings stopping things before the full extent of the attack happened or the city was nuked - I might be OK with the mid-control guy and his robot legion if the alternative seemed like inevitable death and extinction.

Would I be OK with it in the real world? Nope.
 
fac said:
I don't actually see how his arc - where he went from an arms manufacturer who didn't seem to care too much about where the weapons were being used [SNIP] to someone who focused on building what was meant to be a purely defensive system
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I, of course, agree with you, but wanted to highlight this as kind of the problem with back-half Tony Stark: He'd accomplished his character growth by the end of the first Avengers movie.

I think they tried to shift to PTSD Tony, but didn't seem that interested in resolving the PTSD  or in losing his signature smug and cocky attitude that seems to conflict with it. I could even accept if he were using the humor as a mask to hide his struggles, but didn't see any indication that that was the idea.

So what we get going forward is an insufferable prig who I guess we're supposed to feel sorry for.
 
I will absolutely give you that if Stark’s arc ended with the end of the the first Avengers film, I’d likely have a very different appraisal of the character.

I’ll also admit that the smug and cocky attitude makes it difficult for me to give him credit. I just don’t like him.
 
Fletch said:
I, of course, agree with you, but wanted to highlight this as kind of the problem with back-half Tony Stark: He'd accomplished his character growth by the end of the first Avengers movie.

I think they tried to shift to PTSD Tony, but didn't seem that interested in resolving the PTSD  or in losing his signature smug and cocky attitude that seems to conflict with it. I could even accept if he were using the humor as a mask to hide his struggles, but didn't see any indication that that was the idea.
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Yeah, I think they were too superficial with Tony's drinking as a reaction to the PTSD and expecting the arc reactor to poison him. Which is a shame because a bit more serious take on it would have been more interesting. Not a navel-gazing treatise on pain and suffering, but they did not let him be human enough - or Downey played that part down. Although I think we got the best part of that when he seemed genuinely hurt that Steve picked Bucky over him in Civil War and kept from him Bucky's role in his parents death. I thought his desire to mentor Peter was a good thing as well.

Note that I never much paid attention to the Stark from the comics, or Cap for that matter, so for me their characters as seen in the films are not impacted by expectations/preferences from being fans of the comic versions.
 
I mean the theme of Avengers 2 is pretty much a fully realized system of defense under a centralized authority will eventually fall out of that authority's control eventually. That that power eventually takes on a life of its own beyond its creator's desired intent. I mean quite literally in the case of Ultron. Eisenhower warned us about the military industrial complex. How's that turning out for us on the eve of Trump getting ready to turn the best military in the world on its own citizens?
 
My Ant-Man review got buried up there by the Stark debate, but I'm still open for comments if you're interested. In the meantime, I'll take this opportunity to point out that, depending on whether or not you consider Black Widow an Infinity Saga movie (which I do), the end of Phase 2 also puts us exactly half way through the Saga itself.

  • We go into the second half with the full knowledge of what the Infinity Stones are, and 4 of 6 of them in play. At some point, someone pointed out that, if you squint enough, the locations of the known Stones spells out (T)esseract (H)- (A)ether (N)- (O)rb (S)ceptre. I'm skeptical that was intentional, but it's a bit of fun. In any case, Thanos has his gauntlet and he's stated his purpose of collecting all the Stones, even if we don't know why. (Well, comic fans had a suspicion, but it hasn't been said in the movies yet).

  • Arrayed against him are the Avengers, who are in pretty good shape, and a band of semi- do-gooders in space with at least two of them specifically gunning for Thanos. We've also, unknowingly, just met the guy who's the key to undoing Thanos' supposed victory. It's interesting that the midpoint of the Saga has everyone really at the top of their games. There was an option to do an Empire and take us into Phase 3 on a down note, but I like that they chose optimism.

  • Visually, we're at my sweet spot. Cap's fight choreography was top notch and I could watch them on endless loop. Iron Man's armor hadn't quite crossed the line yet where it was all shrinky-flippy vanishing amor, and was still in it's unzipping phase where you at least felt it existed as a solid object with weight. And no vanity helmets other than Star Lord's (which is fine 'cause he's a spaceman). Costuming was a little hit and miss. I like that they were more homages to comic looks rather than direct attempts to copy them. Captain America, Iron Man and Ant-Man settled on great looks during this phase, but some characters, like Thor or Vision, were way over-designed to my eyes. Then we have Wanda, Falcon and Hawkeye who just kind of accidentally had costumes and I couldn't even draw them from memory.

  • Some decent villains, but not a lot. Loki is great, of course, and I'd rate Red Skull and Whiplash near the top too. The Winter Soldier movie is more nuanced and doesn't suffer at all from more subtle villainy. Malekith and Ronan were nearly blank slates, but the early stages were mostly just heroes fighting evil doppelgangers of themselves or hordes of faceless drones. In general, it suffers a lot from what one Youtuber called "the big, grey villain problem."

  • Total runtime so far: 25 hours and 2 minutes. That includes credits, but we're all sitting through them for the post-credit scenes anyways.
Twelve movies and no real stinkers. Even the least of them were really fun. If I wanted to rank them, I'd likely go:
  1. Captain America: Winter Soldier (duh)
  2. Iron Man 2
  3. Avengers
  4. Iron Man
  5. Guardians of the Galaxy
  6. Captain America: The First Avenger
  7. The Incredible Hulk
  8. Ant-Man
  9. Avengers: Age of Ultron
  10. Thor: The Dark World
  11. Iron Man 3
  12. Thor (honestly only escapes being a stinker by virtue of some really great acting)
Ask me again next week and some of those may shift as my moods change, but that's the general gist.
 
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I'd probably drop IM 2 to middle of the pack and Thor up to middle of the pack - I think all four of the initial films (Thor, Cap 1st, IM 1 and Avengers) were very successful in that they had a heavy lift to introduce the MCU and fight against "comic book movies are stupid" while being true to the source material. Honestly at the time I didn't think it would work and expected Cap and Thor to really struggle.
 
@fac, sound arguments. I don't think I properly factored in the historic value of each movie, but I also don't think that's a consideration I'd personally take when scoring a film strictly on how much I liked it.

I will say that these movies benefit a lot from a lack of expectations. Going forward, some movies will suffer in my eyes because they don't do what *I* wanted them to do. It's very unfair to the filmmakers, but it's my honest reaction.
 
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Captain America: Civil War

We've kind of given up all pretense of these movies being their own thing here. It's basically an Avengers sequel with slightly more character moments for Steve than the others. When they announced it, there was a joke tease about Captain America vs the Serpent Society and I have to say, as a huge huge fan of the Serpent Society, I kind of wish they'd done that and made this Avengers 3. I don't know how that would play out practically in the timing of releases, but I feel cheated of a Serpent Society movie.

There's a lot to comment on in this movie, so apologies in advance for the length.
  1. I confess, I like that this movie opens with a flashback. Not only does it not reveal the full events, but the mystery of it is what drives the rest of the plot, and starting off by seeing it happen was the right call. I guess it's not always a terrible gimmick.

  2. Cap is way stronger than I was expecting him to be. Coming from the comics where he was just pinnacle of human achievement, I was not ready for him to be kicking trucks over and curling helicopters.

  3. As the supposed instigating incident of the Sokovia Accords, I'm not seeing the horror of that one floor getting blown up in Laos. Sure it's terrible, but the other option was the bomb blowing up in a crowded market. I feel like office building was the better option, all things considered. Still, the performances went a long way to sell it. Wanda's reaction and Steve just kind of breaking for a moment were really well done, they just didn't match what actually happened in my eyes.

  4. The de-aged Tony Stark in the BARF was a real gamble. The entire world knows what young RDJ looks like. And it looks really good. It's funny because something I noticed (and almost commented on) in Ant-Man was that Michael Douglass' de-aging effect looked better than Hayley Atwell's aging make-up. We've really gotten there.

  5. Daniel Bruhl is a fine actor, but man is his Zemo underwhelming. Maybe it suffers from my expectations of what a Zemo should be, but he was so soft spoken in a way that didn't come across as menacing. I also think it was a mistake making his grudge be against the Avengers as a whole rather than against Captain America specifically. It could've helped skew the movie back to being a Captain America movie if it were more personal to him. Like, his ancestors were nobility but they lost everything when Captain America and the Allie liberated his country for "Democracy." So now he's going to take away everything that Captain America has built. Something like that.

  6. Dating your ex's niece is never not awkward. But speaking of Sharon, I remember seeing a fan theory that she was secretly working with Zemo, and watching this movie again I can't say it doesn't hold up. Multiple times she steps in to get Cap back on track to finding Bucky and on the way to Siberia for the showdown.

  7. That's actually a pretty tidy link getting the Wakandans involved in this movie. At first I'd thought it was just some random African nation that was getting a lot of unwarranted focus (I mean, we know why, but it seemed self-serving), but T'Chaka walks us through how they were reaching out to the world after their vibranium was used in Sokovia, giving them a direct tie to seeing the Sokovia Accords passed. I don't even think it's subtle, but I'd never caught on before.

  8. Chadwick Boseman is such and amazing get for T'Challa. I don't know him from anything else, but he was so effortlessly regal in this movie. A careful blend of charming nobility and menacing swagger. I'm not crazy about the Black Panther costume itself being bulletproof, though. I've gone on a few rants about how Batman should not be wearing body armor, and that goes double for Black Panther. He should be more about stealth and evasion than just standing there and taking it.

  9. We all know Vision and Wanda are supposed to be a couple, but I'm glad they're putting in the work showing them growing together. It's nice. Also, this isn't Bettany's first appearance as Vision, but seeing more of him, and in more casual settings, really showcases the distinctive performance he brings. Like Boseman, he brings a varied blend of traits, but in this case it's sincerity, naivete, and concern. He's really good.

  10. Steve and Tony's scene at the UN facility after their capture is just a great moment between them. They really come across as friends trying to find a way to stay friends. It's one of Downey's most sincere performances as Stark in a while. It's an important scene to show what's at risk and what is lost at the end, and they nailed it.

  11. This is where Stark's Iron Man tech basically crosses over into pixie dust and cobwebs. It's just weightless, infinitely expanding CG effects and flip-away vanity helmets from here on out. I really miss the sturdy structures implied in the earlier versions.

  12. Did Black Widow just punch Bucky in the nuts?

  13. What's the physics of Steve pulling down that helicopter? Like, before he gets hold of the railing, how does him pulling down on the skid not just pull himself up? I guess helicopters can't handle the weight of two people?

  14. I'm on the fence about Spider-Man being introduced here. Tom Holland is great as Peter Parker (like, really great), and the way they portray his powers is really spot-on. I even like that they committed to the skin-tight costume and expressive eyes that you would've thought could only work in comic books. But his appearance here feels really forced. Like Tony says "I've only got 36 hours to find Steve, let me fly to New York and recruit a 15 year old." It doesn't make sense that he'd take the time and it doesn't reflect well on his supposed stance on responsibility and accountability. It's just terrible. I saw a suggestion online that said that, if Bucky were imprisoned in the UN building in New York, Spider-Man could've just shown up on his own to try to help out. It's such an elegant idea that I'm doubly annoyed that they went the blackmail route.

  15. Come to think of it, I'm also bugged that Scott was so nonchalant about being recruited to become an outlaw after spending an entire movie trying to go straight to he could be with his daughter. Just minimal effort there as well.

  16. Sam and Bucky have such great chemistry together. I'm glad they got their own series. I'm really just a big Sam Wilson fan in general. I would not have thought that they could make wing-guy cool in a world with two Iron Mans, but they did. He clonks Tony right in the forehead with Redwing.

  17. They really do ease into the airport fight well. They convincingly try talking things down until they eventually just escalate into the brawl. Tony and his crew seem a little stubborn in the face of a possible cadre of Winter Soldiers, though.

  18. "I remember all of them" is such a chilling line. You really get the full weight of Bucky's tragic story.
I've long had a problem with Zemo's plot here, and how undeservedly successful it was. However, I noticed something this time that I'd never noticed before, and it kind of turns it around for me. As a master planner, Zemo benefits a whole lot from lucky breaks and happenstance. So many things line up for him or just don't go wrong in ways that they could. Even the fact that there was a camera at that one particular spot of a lonely road back in 1991 felt a little forced.

But I just noticed for the first time that, when Zemo finds the super soldiers in their freeze tubes, he's surprised. It's subtle, but it's there. And I realized that they weren't at all what he was looking for when he just happened to find this lucky video tape. It was the tape he was looking for the whole time. His interest in the 1991 mission report wasn't because of the super soldier serum, it was because he found a connection between the Winter Soldier and Iron Man's parents. Yeah there's still a lot of lucky involved in pulling off his plan, but that's a big plot point that I never realized before and I'm kind of impressed.
 
Damien said:
I genuinely dislike Norton as Banner. I prefer Ruffalo, but I would never argue that Ruffalo is a -good- Banner. He's just the one we have that isn't Norton, so I'm okay with it by default. Like Pepper Potts. I actively dislike Paltrow as a person and want nothing but failure for her. She didn't do a -bad- job as Pepper. But I also don't think she did a good job. And given my dislike for her, I'd really have preferred almost anyone else in that role.
I'd actually argue that Ruffalo and Paltrow are two actors this franchise could have replaced and made the movies -better-, whereas overall I think the MCU really nails casting.
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Haven't participated in this version of the thread yet so a few catch-up and related points. Pepper is my favorite character in the MCU. Tony is the star and she's Tony's heart. Without her, he crumbles - and the Avengers crumbled. She was absolutely underwritten in the latter films (not sure why she and Morgan couldn't have just gone into the Quantum Realm while five years of horror are deleted for the universe and then pop out intact at the end, but hey) but that doesn't make her less instrumental, and I think Gwyneth is an excellent cast.
Fletch said:
Again, no Jane in an Avengers movie. No Pepper either, but nobody cares.
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Not true.

We wouldn't have gotten L&T as it was, but I've always wondered what effect exploding Jane in Dark World would have had. Natalie was unhappy doing Marvel and wanted out - hence no appearances for a decade. Killing her off when it would make total sense has always struck me as an interesting choice. I don't know when Mighty Thor happened in the comics, but if it was at the same time I wonder if that possibility tantalized TPTB enough to not explode her.

Fletch said:
Sam and Bucky have such great chemistry together.
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I have never seen this and I've now watched HOURS of them together supposedly having chemistry. It is always a stretch.

Do like the theory of Sharon always being evil. Whatever puts that character back on my screen I'm here for!

I agree that Cap needed an actual third movie - but would it make sense for said movie to not be exactly what this movie is? He's not alone anymore - his life is the Avengers. Him somehow not calling his colleagues to fight the Serpent Society would make no sense whatsoever.

Cap and Sam hunting Bucky - eh. I don't need that that version of the story played out. But it's the Bucky of it all that is the real issue - someone described Bucky as the Helen of Troy of the MCU and I thought that was pretty accurate - he's a catalyst, not a character for most of his screen time.

So should Civil War have been saved for Avengers 3? Totally. We missed a lot of great MCU Avengers stories in the rush to Infinity War. The What If? ep that had Darcy interning for the Avengers really made me stop and think how RUSHED the Avengers era actually was - it's only 2.5 films and some cameos! We could have stayed there for years and I'm sad we didn't - they barely even bought the building before it was decommisioned. I respect the momentum of the choices TPTB made (with the exception of not giving Widow her movie earlier), but I wish there was a Cap 3 and an Avengers: Civil War. That's the Empire moment between five Avengers movies.
 
Schizm said:
Pepper is my favorite character in the MCU.
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You got me. I'm playing up my dislike for Pepper for comedic effect. I really liked her in the first movie, but really only the first movie. Maybe it's the decline in how the character was used over time that soured her character for me. But I don't think "love interest" was a promotion.

Schizm said:
I have never seen this and I've now watched HOURS of them together supposedly having chemistry.
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I love Sam and Bucky together. They're two guys competing to be the best friend of someone who blissfully likes them both. They work really well together, but are catty about it the whole time. It's such a dynamic.

Schizm said:
Him somehow not calling his colleagues to fight the Serpent Society would make no sense whatsoever.
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I believe that it's best for everyone if we just ignore the franchise for the sake of solo stories. Just enjoy the Avengers movies for getting to see everyone team up, but don't get all caught up in wondering why Tony didn't call Captain America to help rescue the president.

Otherwise, you wind up wondering why Tony doesn't just make Iron Man suits for everybody.

Schizm said:
with the exception of not giving Widow her movie earlier),
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Preach! It was a crime against Johansson to make Captain Marvel the first female-led Marvel film. Scarlett was there from the third movie.

I'm exactly at the point where her solo movie takes place, so I'm debating if I should watch it now (and ignore the post-credit scene) or keep it at release schedule like with Captain Marvel.
 
Fletch said:
I believe that it's best for everyone if we just ignore the franchise for the sake of solo stories. Just enjoy the Avengers movies for getting to see everyone team up, but don't get all caught up in wondering why Tony didn't call Captain America to help rescue the president.
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I feel like this is a self-made problem, though. Generally speaking, it's really not hard to explain away why other heroes don't show up with literally seconds-worth of dialogue. I think that's worth investing the time to do for most shared-world stuff specifically to avoid the audience having the obvious question in their minds at all.
Instead, they kind of treat audiences like -we- forget that the other heroes exist, when in actuality I think most audiences think -you the filmmaker- forgot the other heroes exist.
 
I remember this same debate a little while back and we just kind of came out agreeing to disagree.

I just think that if we can accept reading a Captain America comic book without monthly questioning why Thor isn't there helping, then we can do the same for a movie, no explanation needed.

The shared cinematic universe is fun for the moments they team up and the occasional cameo, but I think it's a net negative if that leads to having to sit through a scene in every movie where they do a roll call of everyone and list their excuses for not being available. Personal opinion, but anyone who feels a movie suffers because it doesn't mention a character from another movie is creating their own problems.
 
Fletch said:
I remember this same debate a little while back and we just kind of came out agreeing to disagree.

I just think that if we can accept reading a Captain America comic book without monthly questioning why Thor isn't there helping, then we can do the same for a movie, no explanation needed.

The shared cinematic universe is fun for the moments they team up and the occasional cameo, but I think it's a net negative if that leads to having to sit through a scene in every movie where they do a roll call of everyone and list their excuses for not being available. Personal opinion, but anyone who feels a movie suffers because it doesn't mention a character from another movie is creating their own problems.
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I think the difference is that the comics are coming out weekly. We're kind of... incidentally aware... that the other characters are doing other things. Except Wolverine. He is somehow capable of being in every single book all at once. We can 'know' what the other characters are doing (even if we're not familiar with the specifics) rather than just forcing our minds to -assume- they're doing something.

But I get you, for sure. And we can absolutely agree to disagree on this trivial point. We probably did already talk about this once before, now that you mention it. It's probably such a notable issue (whether you consider it trivial or serious) that it's bound to come to the fore more than once.

That being said, I don't necessarily think films suffer by not doing a roll call, as you aptly put it. I do think doing roll calls for -major- events can, however, curtail anyone even momentarily being pulled out of the story to ask themselves that question. I don't consider it plot-essential - more like good housekeeping. And only when it's relevant. I don't think Cap needs to explain why Thor didn't help him beat up Batroc, ya' know?
 
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