Continued!
5 - The Avengers (Assemble). I always struggle with ranking this one. On the one hand, it was the big gamble that paid off, one that carries itself with such innate confidence that it never
feels like a gamble, and the high points ("Hulk? Smash.") are the stuff of legend. The kind of thing where you feel like you'll be explaining to your grandkids how it felt to see that the first time, one day. On the other hand, the first 45 minutes are boring as hell, a bunch of by-the-numbers busywork that's necessary to get the right pieces in the right places but really feels like it could've been done better, or at least more economically. Mind you, once the film starts going it never stops, and all your issues with that prolonged opening just sort of melt away...plus it's THE AVENGERS, y'know? Even now, 4 years later, that rotating shot of the whole team standing together sends shivers down the spine. Movie magic.
4 - Iron Man 3. The Marmite movie. Even among MCU die-hards, this is the love-it-or-hate-it point that will still be argued over for years to come. If you couldn't guess, I am very much of the 'love' persuasion. Yeah, Tony spends a lot of time out of the suit, but honestly? That's a good thing. Iron Man is invincible, but Tony Stark is all too mortal - something all good Iron Man comics understand. Iron Man 3 breaks all his toys - literally stripping him of his plot armour - and forces him to exercise that mighty brain in new and interesting ways, with some genuinely awesome results. It also successfully torpedoes that smugness I mentioned was bothering me in Iron Man 2, by giving Tony some Chitauri PTSD that Downey Jr. absolutely nails. And the Mandarin...he might be the best MCU villain to date. Really, he's kinda perfect. When they chose to have Tony be captured in Afghanistan back in the first film, they drew a clear parallel between Iron Man and modern terrorism, so of course Iron Man's greatest foe is the apotheosis of the modern terrorist...which is basically a gaudy smokescreen. That's what terrorists tend to be, a mixture of unusual iconography and provocative wordplay, punctuated by chaotic violence. The world was afraid of Bin Laden for years despite him being a barely-mobile old guy plugged into a dialysis machine who was eventually shot dead unceremoniously in someone else's house. Iron Man 3 redrafts that, reinforcing with a welcome shot of comedy (via Ben Kingsley's hilarious Trevor Slattery) and a dark, nasty satire of the military industrial complex. Add to that some expanded and far more interesting roles for Pepper and Rhodey (this is where Cheadle absolutely puts his stamp on the role), the terrific plane rescue and a brilliant last battle and I don't know what else I could ask for. Maybe a groovy '70s-sounding end credits theme? Oh wait,
it's got that too.
3 - Avengers: Age of Ultron. I get why people think Age of Ultron was a disappointing follow-up to the first Avengers. There's nothing in this film to match "I'm always angry" and the like. It never reaches those kind of high notes. What it does do is hit a more respectable average level of, let's just say 'awesomeness' to be childish about it, across the course of the whole film. There's no near-hour-long benchwarming period before the fireworks start - we pretty much get thrown right into the fray as soon as the studio logo disappears, and there's a more generous smattering of action throughout. Plus, when things cool down the resulting chatter is more rewarding, as Whedon (aided by having a good few more other movies to check for notes) has a superior grip on everyone's issues and personas, and cuts to their core more sharply. Even the oft-maligned subplot where Thor buggers off to have a magic bath fits in logically with his confidence-shaking hallucination and his sudden, urgent need to prove he can be just as good at building and protecting as he is at breaking stuff. And of course there's Ultron himself, not a very convincing villain (lack of physical power aside, when it becomes apparent that this sentient alien AI born from an infinity stone is somehow being outsmarted by Tony Stark's equivalent of the MS Office paperclip all hope of accepting him as an 'Avengers-worthy' bad guy dries up) but an endlessly fascinating character - a human-hating machine who can't leave humanity behind, whose odd fully-animated face with artificial lips and eyelids, none of which he needs, are a constant reminder that he is every bit as fickle and flawed as the fleshy ones he looks down upon. Overall, Age of Ultron is bloated, and uneven, but it's far more thoughtful than it looks, and it seems to be the one I'm always rewatching so it's clearly doing something right.
2 - Captain America: The Winter Soldier. Not even sure what's left to say about this one. It's openly the most thematically deep of all the MCU films, a great contextualization of the latter-day war on terror and the politics behind it that pulls no punches about how crappy said things are. It's also another big, important step on the personal, ongoing journey of Cap in the modern day, and fully-realized Black Widow after Avengers nearly-but-not-quite got there, and made everybody fall in love with the Falcon, and had some of the best hand-to-hand combat scenes in any recent film that isn't
The Raid, AND had Samuel L. Jackson's best turn as Nick Fury to date, AND finally gave us robot brain Arnim Zola who talks with his face broadcast onto an old CRT monitor, and...look, it's just really good. You know this. Its only noteworthy issues are the very unremarkable, sometimes iffy score, and a very underused Sharon Carter, and neither of those are gamebreakers.
But even so...
1 - Guardians of the Galaxy. It's the best. It just is. And a lot of that is personal bias - I was a Star Wars kid long before I was a Marvel fan, I love a good space opera, especially one not too uptight about itself - but honestly? I cannot imagine how Guardians of the Galaxy could be better than it is. There's no single scene I'd cut, no character I'd evict, no setpiece I'd demand be taken back to storyboard. It hits all the right notes, makes you laugh, makes you cheer, makes you cry, it's legitimately gorgeous to behold, opens up the MCU in a thousand interesting ways, makes the best possible use of every part of its incredible eclectic cast...it's the best. Were it legal to marry a movie,
I would marry this movie.
Not really sure where
Civil War would fit even after seeing it twice. Could knock
Winter Soldier off the #2 spot, honestly. It's very very good.
Originally Posted by Rogue Star
