Because people who love geek culture have been trained to believe we can’t have nice things, there persists a prevailing feeling that, someday, Marvel Studios is just going to blow it. To this day there are those who predict the studio will fail, if only because nothing stays perfect forever. Yet, when the slate of Phase 2 films were announced, some believed that the MCU was about to fall flat on its face, especially after Iron Man 3 and The Dark World. These naysayers would point to two films on the Phase 2 slate as evidence for their argument, the…

When the films of the Marvel Cinematic Universe are ranked from best to worst, Captain America: The Winter Soldier always ranks very highly. The first Marvel Studios directorial outing of Joe and Anthony Russo, they genre-hopped from old-timey-war-movie homage to spy thriller. However, more so than that, the filmmakers crafted a story that adequately deals with a serious, real-world issue: creeping authoritarianism. Comic book stories have long been places where metaphorical parables unfold about real moral and political issues. However, sometimes, when these films take these issues head-on the allegory falls flat. In this movie, Captain America’s dedication to the…

Debates about the strength of the Hulk and Captain Marvel aside, Thor is the most powerful Avenger because he is of Asgard. Asgardians are presented to the MCU viewer as the baddest-asses in all of the cosmos. They have a 5,000-year lifespan and are very hard to kill. When you have an entire race of nearly-indestructible gods to contend with, you need a truly formidable villain. Thor: A Dark World tries to give us this with the Dark Elves and the Aether, later revealed to be an Infinity Stone. This movie wants to make these gods seem like mere mortals…

The third Iron Man film faced, perhaps, the highest expectations yet of a Marvel movie. It had to sufficiently wrap-up Tony Stark’s journey and effectively follow-up the smash hit that was The Avengers. This meant that fans had plenty of ideas about what they wanted to see from the film, but the creators apparently had other ideas. Jon Favreau returns for a few scenes as driver-turned-head-of-security Happy Hogan, but he abdicated the director’s chair in favor of Shane Black, who also co-wrote the screenplay with Drew Pearce. Instead of a big comic book epic showing Iron Man’s showdown with his…

The hype leading up to the first MCU team-up film was nowhere near the level the hype leading up to Endgame has reached. Still, at the time, The Avengers was one of the most hotly anticipated superhero movies of all time. I honestly don’t recall what the prevailing feeling on social media was about the movie, but personally, I believed it would be a disaster. Taking four distinct characters from four discrete stories and putting them together in a single movie felt like too much for anyone to achieve. Even though my expectations were low, I planned to see it…

In 2011, the modern superhero genre turned a decade-old, and it had been 33 years since Christopher Reeve donned the tights and cape to play Superman. By this point in the development of the genre, some believed that there was just no place for morally-straightforward heroes. The whole point of the superhero film was to see these gods made real, and that meant making them flawed. Zach Snyder’s major films are, famously, drawn from comic book source material. Like many fans of the medium, he prefers the grittier comic books featuring morally gray heroes, violence, and sex. When promoting his…

Every Phase 1 Marvel film represents a huge gamble by the studio, but if they were ever going to fall flat on their faces, it would have been with Thor. (Arguably they did, but we’ll talk about The Dark World later.) What makes this film the linchpin for Phase 1 is that it was the first time that the newly-formed Marvel Studios had to embrace some truly wacky comic book elements. By 2011, the modern superhero genre had been around for a decade. Part of what made these films work so well is that the filmmakers grounded them in reality…