10. Guardians of the Galaxy (2014)

This post is part of a series I am writing on the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe from Iron Man to Spider-Man: Far From Home. There may be spoilers for the entire series of films.

Still riding high on the success of Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Marvel Studios brought us Guardians of the Galaxy, their first entirely new property since 2011’s Captain America: The First Avenger, and the first Marvel movie which was not directly linked to the Avengers franchise. At the time, it felt like a pretty risky move – were audiences who just saw a superhero action film loosely inspired by cold war-era spy thrillers looking to watch a comedy sci fi starring a tree and a talking raccoon?

In reality it was probably just what Marvel needed at the time: a film that, if successful, would teach audiences that Marvel is more than just the superhero fare they’d seen so far, allowing the studio to possibly branch out into different genres and have their core audience follow them along. If it failed, then it was far enough removed from their existing properties that they could likely just go back to the tried-and-tested formula without significantly harming their brand.

Of course, the result was a massive success. Guardians of the Galaxy is one of the best Marvel movies – as is its sequel, 2017’s Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 – and this is in no small part due to writer and director James Gunn. Starting from a script by Nicole Perlman, Gunn rewrote the entire film, significantly reworking the plot, adding in iconic elements like Starlord’s cassette player, and creating the role of Yondu for his long-time friend and collaborator Michael Rooker (who has been cast in every film James Gunn has directed, including the forthcoming The Suicide Squad for DC). Gunn’s brother Sean was cast in the film as Kraglin – Yondu’s right-hand man – and also performed the role of Rocket Raccoon during filming, providing motion capture and improvising some of the character’s dialogue (Bradley Cooper voiced the character in the final product). In the tightly-controlled environment of a Marvel Studios production, where more established directors have sometimes appeared to clash with producers over the direction of their films, Guardians of the Galaxy is very much a James Gunn project.

The essential formula underlying the film is pretty simple and familiar: A group of misfits and outcasts are brought together because of a macguffin, they have to work together against a bigger outside threat, and wind up becoming a kind of found family (and the idea of family and what it means is an essential component of the Guardians movies, as we’ll see in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2). It’s a feel good story of people coming together and succeeding against the odds; it’s fun, funny, and packed with charismatic actors (including Vin Diesel, who manages to fill every utterance of the words “I am Groot” with meaning); the outer space setting gives it a distinct look that stands out from the realistic settings and somewhat muted colour palettes of most of the Marvel Cinematic Universe; and it has a killer soundtrack, using licensed songs to an extent that the MCU hadn’t really done before, other than a few classic rock songs in the Iron Man films. It’s just a well-made, fun movie, and you don’t even need to be all that into the MCU to appreciate it.

If it has any weak points, they are few. There’s the villain Ronan, who’s a bit of a non-entity. He has a personal connection to Drax – he is responsible for the death of Drax’s family, and when the film needs the characters to learn they can’t win unless they work together we get a decent character-driven fight scene where Drax gets his ass thoroughly kicked by Ronan – but he doesn’t really have anything to do with the rest of the Guardians, and doesn’t really do a whole lot in the film other than be a big, blue, angry man. In addition, Ronan is used as the first real introduction of Thanos (as played by Josh Brolin) to the MCU, where he basically ends up looking like an underperforming lackey who’s acting against his boss’s orders. I understand there was more to Ronan that was cut from the final version of the film – more background on his religious fanaticism and connection to the Kree Empire – and overall it ends up seeming like a bit of a waste of the talents of actor Lee Pace, which was not at all remedied by later having Ronan make what is essentially a cameo in 2019’s Captain Marvel. It actually reminds me of what happened to Christopher Ecclestone in Thor: The Dark World: a talented actor brought in only to be entirely covered in heavy makeup and having their character cut down to the point of utter forgettability. But it’s also understandable – ultimately, the villain of Guardians of the Galaxy didn’t really matter; it was always about the heroes, and he was just the obstacle they had to join together to overcome (quite literally, in the climactic scene).

There’s also something to be said about misogyny in the film, specifically to do with Peter Quill’s sex life, and that one joke where Drax – who can only speak literally and does not understand metaphor – calls Gamora “the green whore”, but this is something I think I want to cover when I talk about Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, alongside things like Mantis and Peter Quill’s mother, so – I’ll get back to that.

As far as connections to the wider MCU, this was of course the first film in the franchise to straight-up acknowledge that its macguffin was an Infinity Stone, and show us Thanos wanting those stones. The characters and settings introduced in this film and its sequel would eventually come up again in that context in Avengers: Infinity War, but that didn’t make this a sequel or setup film for that story – other than the slightly shoehorned appearance of Thanos, Guardians of the Galaxy stands on its own – and is all the better for it, being one of the best films the franchise has produced.

The same cannot be said for the next film in the franchise, the (somewhat unfairly) maligned Avengers: Age of Ultron, a film that by its very nature cannot stand alone.

Read in 2019

This has been a pretty light year for reading. I found myself prioritising other things over reading, to the point where I didn’t read any novels between March and, um, yesterday. I did keep up somewhat with comics, though also at a reduced pace.

Novel

– Taste of Marrow – Sarah Gailey
– Jade City – Fonda Lee
– The Art of Starving – Sam J. Miller
– Space Opera – Catherynne M. Valente

Audiobook

– House of Sundering Flames – Aliette de Bodard, narr. Peter Kenny

Comic

– The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl vols 8-10 – Ryan North, Erica Henderson, Derek Charm, Naomi Franquiz, Rico Renzi, Travis Lanham, & Madeline McGrane
– Ms. Marvel vols 9 & 10 – G. Willow Wilson, Nico Leon, Ian Herring, Joe Caramagna, Saladin Ahmed, Rainbow Rowell, Hasan Minaj, Gustavo Duarte, Bob Quinn, Elmo Bondoc, Devin Grayson, Eve L. Ewing, Jim Zub, Takeshi Miyazawa, Joey Valquez, Kevin Libranda, Minkyu Jung & Juan Vlasco
– Giant Days vol 8-10 – John Allison, Max Sarin, Julia Madrigal, Liz Fleming, Jenna Ayoub, Whitney Cogar & Jim Campbell
– Sex Criminals vol 5 – Matt Fraction & Chip Zdarsky
– Kill or Be Killed vol 4 – Ed Brubaker, Sean Phillips & Elizabeth Breitweiser
– Delilah Dirk and the Pillars of Hercules – Tony Cliff
– Monstress vol 3 – Marjorie Liu, Sana Takeda, & Rus Wooton
– Saga vol 9 – Brian K. Vaughan & Fiona Staples
– Exiles vol 1 & 2 – Saladin Ahmed, Javier Rodriguez, Alvaro Lopez, Jordie Bellaire, Chris O’Halloran, Rod Reis, Lee Ferguson, Joe Quinones, Joe Rivera, Jordan Gibson, Chris Sotomayor, Muntsa Vicente, & Joe Caramagna
– My Heroes Have Always Been Junkies – Ed Brubaker, Sean Phillips & Jacob Phillips
– Isola vol 1 – Brendan Fletcher, Karl Kerschl, Msassyk & Aditya Bidikar
– X-Men Grand Design: Second Genesis – Ed Piskor
– Paper Girls vol 5 – Brian K. Vaughan, Cliff Chiang, Matt Wilson & Jared K. Fletcher
– Shade, The Changing Woman – Cecil Castelucci, Marley Zarcone, Ande Parks, Kelly Fitzpatrick & Saida Temofonte
– Eternity Girl – Magdalene Visaggio, Sonny Liew, Chris Chuckry & Todd Klein
– The Wild Storm vol 3 – Warren Ellis, Jon Davis-Hunt, Steve Buccellato, Ivan Plascencia, John Kalisz & Simon Bowland
– The Wicked + The Divine vols 8 & 9 – Kieron Gillen, Jamie McKelvie, Matt Wilson & Clayton Cowles
– By Night vols 1 & 2 – John Allison, Christine Larsen, Sarah Stern & Jim Campbell
– Original Sin omnibus – Jason Aaron, Mike Deodato Jr, Frank Martin, Chris Eliopoulos & too many more to list here
– Avengers vols 1-4 – Jason Aaron, Ed McGuinness, Sarah Picheli, David Marquez, Andrea Sorrentino, Cory Smith, Paco Medina, Elisabetta D’Amico, Jason Masters, Stefano Caselli, Justin Ponsor, Mark Morales, Juan Vlasco, Jay Leisten, Karl Story, David Curiel, Scott Hanna, Karl Kesel, Erick Arciniega, Jason Keith, Cory Petit, Joe Caramagna, and a few guest artists what the hell this is too many artists for one comic how is the colouring still so consistently ugly yes I know it’s a stylistic choice but I still hate how dark everything is
– Thor vols 1 & 2 – Jason Aaron, Mike Del Mundo, Tony Moore, Lee Garnett, Christian Ward, John Rauch, Marco D’Alfonso, Antonio Fabela & Joe Sabino
– DIE vol 1 – Kieron Gillen, Stephanie Hans & Clayton Cowles
– Head Lopper vol 3 – Andrew MacLean, Jordie Bellaire & Erin MacLean
– The War of the Realms – Jason Aaron, Russell Dauterman, Matt Wilson & Joe Sabino

How to make The Rise of Skywalker a better movie

(In my opinion.)
(Not including “Give it a better title”.)

Star Wars Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker is an okay film. It’s far from the best Star Wars movie, but it’s also a big step above the prequels. It just seems like a series of weird decisions were made, resulting in a badly paced and unsatisfying film. I’ve had these ideas rattling around my head since I saw the film, so I’m going to put them down here: 5 small changes (which are not all the same degree of “small” but generally leave the overall film unchanged), then 2 bigger ones (one that dramatically alters the plot, and the other which changes the ending), all of which I think would be an improvement in some way on what we got.

5 Small Changes That Would Make the Movie Better

1. Set up the opening crawl in The Last Jedi

The Rise of Skywalker begins with the baffling out-of-nowhere reveal that Emperor Sheev Palpatine is alive, that he has broadcast a message to the entire galaxy, and that all the characters in the film are now searching for him. It’s a jarring moment that sets up how poorly paced and ill-conceived a lot of the story in the first half of the film will be.

One simple solution would have been to set it up at the end of the previous film. Toward the end of The Last Jedi, the surviving Resistance members are trapped in an old mining base under siege from the First Order, and sending out messages to the galaxy asking for someone – anyone – to help. They receive no replies, and it seems like all hope is lost. What if, in that moment where they’re at their lowest, that was when the Emperor chose to broadcast his message? They could double down on the hopelessness of the moment – right before Luke shows up to restore some of that hope – set up a mystery for The Rise of Skywalker, and even give us a little bit of Kylo Ren reacting to the message to set up his obsession with finding Palpatine in the beginning of the third film.

When the audience already knows that Palpatine is alive – and has heard the message that is referenced in the opening crawl – it goes from baffling nonsense to a reminder of where things stand.

2. Remove Kylo Ren from Pasaana, or, make the Knights of Ren less pointless

The first 15 minutes of the film are a mess. The reveal of Palpatine in the opening text is immediately followed by a rushed sequence of Kylo Ren finding a Sith wayfinder, flying to Exegol, meeting Palpatine, and setting off with the Knights of Ren to find Rey. This is followed by the utter wasting of the Knights of Ren, who appear for a few seconds at a time only to stand around in dramatic poses doing nothing – an unintentionally funny choice that completely undercuts any sense of threat they’re meant to pose to the main characters. If we’re meant to take them seriously as a threat, they need to do something more than take Chewbacca prisoner off-screen.

So the Knights of Ren should be the final confrontation for Rey on Pasaana. Kylo Ren should stay away, rather than showing up for that odd tug-of-war scene and the transparently manipulative Chewbacca death fake-out. The way to do this is by drawing out the scenes that lead to Kylo meeting Palpatine – spread them across the first part of the film, have him make his way to Exegol while Rey and the others are on Pasaana, and return after Kijimi. Instead of Kylo confronting Rey in the desert, have Rey fight the Knights of Ren – and only barely make it out alive. If you’re going to use the Knights, and set them up as the ultimate badasses as JJ Abrams clearly intended, you need them to actually pose a threat. Otherwise they’re pointless, and in the cut of Episode IX we got, the Knights of Ren are pointless.

3. Let Rose Tico be part of the movie

Episode IX does Kelly Marie Tran a huge disservice. It takes one of the major characters of The Last Jedi and turns her into a glorified extra, with only scant screen-time. I’ve heard the reason for this is that the writers wanted a major character to be present in the General Leia scenes – that are made up of cutting-room floor footage from The Force Awakens, limiting pretty heavily what they could do with her – but the end result comes across like JJ Abrams only wanting to play with the characters he came up with himself.

Rose didn’t need to be at the Resistance base with Leia – the same thing could be accomplished by the presence of Maz Kanata, Lando Calrissian, and perhaps most appropriately Billie Lourd’s character Lt. Connix. You could even swap Rose for Chewbacca, and have him be the major presence at Leia’s side, if it feels like there are too many characters present on Pasaana and Kijimi. However it’s done, it’s better than the way they wasted her.

Since I’ve already assumed we’re ditching the Chewbacca death fake-out, the group’s trip to the Star Destroyer over Kijimi can be reframed, with Rose and Finn arguing to the others that they should intervene in the First Order’s terrorising of the citizens of the planet – they can go up there to free the prisoners the Stormtroopers have taken, helping set up the reason why those citizens will show up to fight at the end of the movie. It would respect Rose’s character as established in the Canto Bight sequence of The Last Jedi, and Finn’s bond with her developed from those same scenes, to have them be the ones that argue in favour of helping the common people rather than throwing aside everything to follow the main quest.

(And hey, we’re also ditching the scene where a Final Order Star Destroyer blows up Kijimi. It’s complete nonsense, both for being the second fake-out death in the film (Zorii Bliss and Babu Frik show up again at the end despite having no way off planet) and for having one Final Order ship be out there doing this when the entire ending is about preventing the ships from launching from Exegol.)

4. Let Rey be a nobody

Rey begins this trilogy in a trap of her own making. Her parents sold her and left her behind on Jakku; she spent her entire life waiting for them to come back and get her. It takes the appearance of BB-8 and Finn to get her to leave the planet, and the intervention of Maz Kanata to make her finally admit to herself that she didn’t really expect her parents to come back – that she needed to move past them and live her life. The Last Jedi sees her still caught on the idea of who her parents were and why they abandoned her – and gives us a bold answer, when Kylo Ren forces Rey to confront what she – once again – already knew: that they were nobodies. She didn’t come from anywhere special, and her parents were just flawed human beings. In the end, it was only up to Rey herself to decide who she was, and whether she should be defined by where she came from.

But nope! Never mind, she’s actually the granddaughter of the Galactic Emperor. They just couldn’t let Star Wars actually do something interesting with her character, so no – if she’s a powerful Jedi she has to be the descendant of someone else who’s strong in the Force. Nevermind the final scene of The Last Jedi, which took that message about Rey and expanded it, showing that the Force belongs to everyone through the person of the slave boy on Canto Bight. Nope – she’s just born into Force royalty.

The worst thing about this decision is that it doesn’t actually affect anything in The Rise of Skywalker. We’re meant to take it as an indication that, because she’s the grandchild of a Sith, her path leads inevitably to the Dark Side, and so this is her struggle for the film. But we already saw Luke reprimand her for being drawn toward the Dark, and we hear in this film how she’s been disturbed by Force-vision dreams of herself on the Sith throne. She doesn’t need to be a Palpatine to struggle with the temptation of the Dark. You could entirely cut the revelation of her heritage from this film and it would change nothing.

Why was Palpatine hunting for her as a child, and why does he want her brought to Exegol? Because he had a Force vision that this child, born strong in the Force, would be the one to kill him. Simple, done. The film still works with no other changes needed.

5. Finn was a Stormtrooper – let that matter

Finn’s story across this trilogy is a bit of a mess. He defects from the Stormtroopers because he can’t stand to see his fellow soldiers killed and doesn’t want to kill civilians; he immediately turns around and starts killing his former comrades. But he still has a character arc; in The Force Awakens he has to confront his instinct to run as far away as he can get and instead face his fear to fight for his friend, Rey. In The Last Jedi he learns that there’s more to fight for than just keeping himself and his friends safe, and that it’s better to fight to protect something than to fight to destroy the thing he hates (i.e., the First Order who kidnapped and brainwashed him, along with all his fellow Stormtroopers). In The Rise of Skywalker, he follows Rey around, figures out he’s Force-sensitive, and blows up a Final Order ship – he doesn’t really have an arc, and his connection with more soldiers who defected from the First Order doesn’t amount to anything.

It really feels like the problem is in the final act of the film. Finn and ex-Stormtrooper Jannah lead the assault on the Final Order command ship to destroy the tower which will allow the rest of the fleet to navigate out of Exegol’s atmosphere. Then, having accomplished this, they decide to stay on the ship for one more thing – which turns out to be hotwiring a cannon on the Star Destroyer’s hull in order to fire it at the command deck. When you think about it this is a pretty small thing to put their lives on, in the context of a fleet of so many of these identical ships; yes, they kill the commander of the fleet, but it’s just one ship.

But what if instead of commandeering a cannon, they’d hijacked the communications system? What if Finn and Jannah had hacked into the fleet’s comms and broadcast a message to all of the Stormtroopers, all the kidnapped children forced to fight this war, to tell them it was possible to rebel? What if the entire origin of this character, and his meeting someone just like him who had also defected, had actually meant something to the story and helped achieve the victory they were hoping for? You can still give the audience the pleasure of seeing Allegiant General Pryde blown up on his command deck, just have it happen when one of his own ships fires on him, as the whole fleet tears itself apart around him.

2 Bigger Changes That I’m Less Sure About But Like the Idea Of

1. Ditch the Knights of Ren and bring back Phasma

(This is where I pretty much veer off into fanfic.)

Let’s face it, the Knights of Ren are dumb and useless in this film. Yeah, we could make them work better by giving them a decent fight scene with Rey in the early parts of the film, but why bother? They only exist because of a throwaway line in The Force Awakens, and Abrams doesn’t seem to have known what to do with them. So just get rid of them.

Instead, when the main group arrives on Pasaada, someone unexpected shows up: Captain Phasma. She survived the destruction of the Super Star Destroyer in The Last Jedi – though didn’t get out of it unharmed – and is no longer working directly for the First Order: she just wants Finn dead. The Knights of Ren were a bunch of randos we’d never seen before, but for Phasma this is personal.

Our heroes barely make it out of Pasaana and head on to Kijimi. Since they’re in the area and also hunting Rey, Phasma tips off the First Order about where they’re heading and they follow; this leads to another confrontation on Kylo Ren’s Star Destroyer, where Finn, Poe, and Rose are captured by Phasma but rescued by General Hux. We get another “we think she’s dead” bit here, but we’ve already by this point established that she’s going to keep coming back, and these kind of fake-outs are more fun and less manipulative with a recurring villain, so she returns and she’s the one to kill the traitor Hux (note: Phasma has history with Hux and was recruited to the First Order by Hux’s dad, so there are extra levels here for people who’ve read her novel).

From there, Phasma travels to Exegol with Allegiant General Pryde. When Finn and the other defectors make their assault on the Star Destroyer, she of course goes out to face them. However that final confrontation plays out, she most likely ends up killed by her own Stormtroopers after Finn and Jannah successfully broadcast their message. For bonus points, you absolutely must go back and restore this deleted scene from The Last Jedi, which is huge for establishing Phasma’s character and should never have been cut in the first place.

2. Kill Rey, save Ben

I’m conflicted about this one. There are good arguments for each of these characters surviving, or even for both of them. This is probably the least solid suggestion I’m making.

In this film, Kylo Ren gets a presto change-o deathbed redemption, never facing up for the horrific crimes committed both by himself and by the First Order while he was Supreme Leader. What if he was the one who lived? What if Rey had struck down Palpatine, knowing this was exactly what the Emperor wanted, and then sacrificed her life to revive Ben Solo, sidestepping the Sith legacy the Emperor wanted to place upon her. Maybe it was her destiny to kill him and take his place, and she could fulfill that destiny and then give up her life to avoid being corrupted.

Imagine Ben turning up, alive, while the Resistance members celebrate their victory. Someone calls him Kylo Ren, but he says no – his name is Ben Skywalker Solo. They don’t accept him, and he doesn’t expect them to: he’s there to stand trial for his crimes, and begin to atone.

My main reservation is that it might undermine Rey’s arc, that ending where she gets to choose her own path and identity, to do this. But it would be a fascinating turn for Star Wars, something that lived up to the promise of The Last Jedi‘s bold choices.

(Also: Let Finn and Poe kiss.)

(Seriously, John Boyega and Oscar Isaac have spent years talking about how they had such great chemistry and wish they’d gotten to play the characters explicitly as a couple. Someone give those two a big, gay movie.)

9. Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014)

This post is part of a series I am writing on the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe from Iron Man to Spider-Man: Far From Home. There will be spoilers for the entire series of films.

I’m not saying anything new when I say that Captain America: The Winter Soldier is one of the best movies in the Marvel universe. Most fans of the films will say the same thing. Having heard it said for years since my last viewing of the film, I’d kind of internalised it as “oh yeah, that’s one of the good ones”. But I was honestly kind of surprised at just how much better it is than the films I’ve watched so far in this series.

Taking inspiration from 1970s political conspiracy thrillers, the writers – Christopher Markus & Stephen McFeely, who also wrote Captain America: The First Avenger and Thor: The Dark World – and directors Joe and Anthony Russo set out to explore what it’s like for the good soldier Steve Rogers, fresh from the black-and-white conflict of WWII Europe, to now have to deal with the murkier territory of modern politics. Now working as an asset for S.H.I.E.L.D., Cap is struggling with the idea that the people he works with may not tell him everything he needs to know, and he may not always know who he is fighting or why.

Add into that the revelation that S.H.I.E.L.D. is working on a program to police the world with giant helicarriers that can identify and eliminate targets anywhere on the planet, and then an attack on Nick Fury from whom he receives the message “S.H.I.E.L.D. compromised”, and Steve Rogers is left with no one to trust. Cue Captain America on the run, having to rely on Natasha’s espionage skills to figure out what’s really going on in S.H.I.E.L.D.

The Winter Soldier is not just the best Captain America film, it’s also the film that makes the best use of Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow and Samuel L. Jackson’s Nick Fury. Natasha Romanov finally has a personality beyond “I need to make up for all the bad things I’ve done” – she’s funny, smart, and she deeply cares about the people she’s close to. For Fury’s part, after being the guy in the shadows who brings in heroes to deal with problems, he finally gets involved in the action as we see him endure a brutal attack and car chase leading to his apparent death.

Speaking of that car chase, the action in this movie is superb. Cap’s attack on the ship in the opening & his faceoff with Batroc, the attempt on Nick Fury’s life, the elevator fight, the highway fight with the Winter Soldier – if nothing else you can watch this for the fights and be satisfied. It’s ridiculous to call a film where a man called Falcon straps a pair of jet-powered wings to his back and flies around “realistic”, but there’s a level of groundedness to the hand-to-hand combat, an attempt to keep the feel of humans at the peak of their ability rather than unstoppable demigods.

The revelation in this film that S.H.I.E.L.D. has been infiltrated from its founding by Hydra agents is a big shakeup of the Marvel Universe, but one which only really played out in the often-ignored TV show Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.. It led to the Avengers working as an independent organisation funded directly by Tony Stark, but that’s not something that’s ever explored in the movies. Hydra is apparently dealt with once and for all in the opening of Avengers: Age of Ultron, and we don’t really hear of them again. Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. stopped crossing over with the movies a few seasons in, and by season 6 seems to be ignoring movie continuity entirely. It’s a shame, because a resurgent Hydra would have made an interesting ongoing enemy for the heroes. Maybe the new Falcon and the Winter Soldier TV show will give us some of that.

Obviously Marcus, McFeely, and the Russos went on to make bigger and bigger films in the Marvel Universe after the success of Captain America: The Winter Soldier, but they never quite hit the same highs they did here. I suspect it’s a problem of throwing such a large number of characters into the stories – this film was an ensemble, but it was nowhere near on the level of Civil War or the Avengers films, and it’s hard to deal with such a large cast of characters in a satisfying way. Avengers: Endgame is probably where they came closest, and that’s because it was a direct sequel, and one where the cast was cut down significantly for most of the film. These big crossover events are not the easiest thing to work with, and they honestly did an impressive job pulling everything together, but at this point I’m much more interested to see what these creators do outside of the MCU when they can maybe keep things a bit tighter.

I also hope the MCU can give us more films like The Winter Soldier in the future. They’ve made some good films since,and in particular the Spider-Man films have been reaching similar levels of quality, but I’d like a bit more of that action thriller stuff. Here’s hoping Black Widow delivers.

8. Thor: The Dark World (2013)

This post is part of a series I am writing on the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe from Iron Man to Spider-Man: Far From Home. There will be spoilers for the entire series of films.

A lot of people would tell you that Thor: The Dark World is the worst Marvel movie, but it isn’t. (The worst Marvel movie is either Iron Man 2 or Thor.) It sits pretty firmly in the tier of competent-but-forgettable films like Avengers: Age of Ultron, Ant-Man or Doctor Strange. I think it just became a bit of a meme to put down this film, since it came out in the middle of a run of more successful releases, from Captain America: The First Avenger through to Guardians of the Galaxy.

The film had potential to be really good, but in my opinion it was sunk by some of the creative decisions surrounding the film’s antagonist, the dark elf Malekith. The dark elves come from the realm of Svartalfheim, and Malekith is a powerful, and evil, sorcerer who has faced off against Thor many times in Marvel’s comics. But the Marvel cinematic universe tends to move toward sci fi in its reinterpretation of comic material, and it does so here: The dark elves are essentially aliens with advanced technology, Malekith simply the leader and most ruthless of them. Rather than deep, lush forests full of magic, Svartalfheim is a blasted wasteland covered in darkness. The costume design on the elves, with stiff masks intended to look kind of creepy and unnerving, results in something that looks like a Doctor Who alien of the week.

Malekith the Accursed

Also Malekith the Accursed

They’re generic alien soldiers, uniformly grey and dull, and utterly unmemorable. The worst part of it is that Malekith, usually a fun character in the vein of Loki – although more sadistic – is reduced to the same level of blandness. He has no personality in the film, and his iconic appearance – his face half blue, half black, with flowing white hair – is absent except for a small homage when he becomes scarred by Thor’s lightning – on the wrong side of his face.

The generic nature of the antagonists even extends to them having the exact same backstory as the frost giants of Thor – they tried to conquer the realms, Asgard fought them and stole the device that gave them their power – the Crucible in Thor, the Aether in The Dark World – and their world was left dark and lifeless until they try to infiltrate Asgard and steal it back.

I truly believe if they had gone in a different direction with the design of the elves, made them colourful, gave them personality, had them using magic instead of technology, this film could have been great fun to watch. Hela and Loki are a joy to watch because the writers and directors give the actors the opportunity to really go larger than life and have fun with the role – Malekith could have easily been the same.

The other place the film has problems is with the handling of Jane Foster – it does well enough with her in the beginning and the climax, but for a film that was intended to focus more heavily on the love story between Jane and Thor, she spends a significant amount of time as little more than a macguffin to be transported from place to place. During the parts of the film where Thor’s primary motivation is keeping Jane safe, the film lets her disappear into the background in favour of centering Thor and Loki’s relationship. This is not to say the Thor and Loki parts didn’t work – they’re a highlight of the film – but it’s a real disservice to Natalie Portman to have her character treated this way.

I know I’ve gone on a lot about the problems with this film after starting by saying “it’s not as bad as people say”, but it does bother me so much that Marvel would take an interesting character and reduce it to the most generic version possible. It’s also notable that they did this at the same time they released a Marvel One-Shot that retconned Iron Man 3’s villain – suggesting that Aldrich Killian was not in fact the Mandarin, but had used the name and imagery of a real terrorist to create his fake one. It shows that someone in Marvel felt like such major changes to iconic villains were not the right direction, and wanted to dial it back. Meanwhile, The Dark World does this to Malekith.

The result of the changes is that, while it’s not a bad film, it is very much a skippable one.

As far as the larger Marvel series, I’ve already touched in my Phase One post on how this was the first film to introduce the Infinity Stones, and name the Aether and Tesseract; the Aether is of course entirely unlike the Reality Stone we see used by Thanos, so I think some creative liberties have occurred as they put the Infinity Saga together. This film also became more significant with its inclusion in the time travel segments of Avengers: Engdame, with Thor returning to speak to his mother shortly before her death. The failure to include Natalie Portman in those scenes – beyond what seems to be some unused footage from The Dark World and perhaps some body double work – is a little disappointing; Portman’s departure from the role since this film has left a noticeable hole in Thor’s character development as the writers continue to dance around the subject, with lines like “sorry Jane dumped you” shrugged off by the hero in Thor Ragnarok.

If you’re a fan of the Marvel formula, Thor: The Dark World is fine. There’s enough in this one to enjoy. If you’re only looking to watch the best that the superhero genre has to offer, give it a miss.

7. Iron Man 3 (2013)

This post is part of a series I am writing on the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe from Iron Man to Endgame. There will be spoilers for the entire series of films.

Marvel’s Phase Two started off with something that was less a “phase two film” and more just a continuation of a remarkably successful franchise. With Jon Favreau choosing not to return as director, Shane Black was brought in to take over, having worked with Robert Downey Jr in the past. Because it’s a Shane Black film, it’s set at Christmas, although that has no real relevance to the plot.

Iron Man 3 does two interesting things with Tony Stark: It shows him vulnerable – suffering from panic attacks after he almost died in space in The Avengers – and it shows him suffering consequences for being an asshole to people. The film’s villain, Aldrich Killian, becomes who he is because Tony treated him like dirt back before Iron Man was a thing. When your hero is an arrogant prick who gets away with being an asshole because he’s rich and charismatic, it’s nice to sometimes bring him down a peg with things like that.

One of the more controversial elements of this film was the handling of the Mandarin. The Mandarin had been hinted at as a major villain for Iron Man since the first film, and although many more overt references didn’t make it into the final films, people were expecting a lot – and the film subverted it, presenting a fairly stereotypical middle-eastern terrorist only to reveal him as an actor, Trevor Slattery, hired by Aldrich Killian to distract people from the real source of the bombings. It’s a fun reveal, and Sir Ben Kingsley plays Trevor brilliantly, but apparently some fans didn’t like that the Mandarin turned out to not be what they expected. I didn’t have a problem with it myself. The presentation of the fake Mandarin feels a little dated these days, belonging to the 2000s and fears of Osama bin Laden, but it works for the film.

What’s not clear is what Killian’s plan was meant to be. I can understand him allowing people to think explosions caused by the Extremis formula were the act of terrorists as a cover up, but I’m not sure why he was carrying out such a coordinated terrorist campaign or even doing things publicly at all. The closest thing to an explanation I can see is that it was meant to draw out War Machine – rebranded Iron Patriot – so they could then use it to get the President, all in aid of installing the Vice President in the White House, who would support A.I.M.’s research… which seems kind of over-elaborate. They already had the VP on side, they had money and technology, they could probably have been pretty well positioned regardless. Why kill random people?

Of course it’s those random explosions blamed on terrorists that leads Tony to Killian. Happy Hogan (Jon Favreau) follows a suspicious-looking employee of Killian (Eric Savin, played by James Badge Dale) and ends up caught in one of the explosions, which leads Tony to try to track down the Mandarin and ultimately discover the connection with A.I.M.

Shane Black and co-writer Drew Pearce treat this more as an action thriller than a superhero blockbuster, and one result is that Tony spends most of his time out of the suit. It’s an opportunity to show the character as more than his high tech armour, as the inventor who could build an Iron Man suit in a cave with a pile of scrap. It also lets Black make full use of Robert Downey Jr without the CGI getting in the way, which is a positive. The focus on Tony without the armour is backed up by the final line of the film, a repeat of Downey’s final line in Iron Man: “I am Iron Man.” The same words, but this time after Tony has destroyed all of the suits he built when he was dealing with his paranoia and trauma. It leaves the impression that this is a new Tony, that he can be Iron Man without needing to wear the Iron Man suit.

Unfortunately that doesn’t seem to be what Marvel wants for the character, because the next time we see Tony, in Avengers: Age of Ultron, he’s back in the suit, back to being obsessed with protecting the world and building endless iterations of his Iron Man technology to do so. Iron Man 3 functions well as a cap on a 3-film sequence, moving past Tony’s dilemma from the first film – how can he protect the people he loves from the same weapons he helped create? – and leaving us with a satisfying conclusion, but because of the endless nature of the shared cinematic universe, the very next film they hit the reset button. They can’t do that forever in the films, of course – they’ve just gone and done the opposite in Endgame, killing Tony Stark and retiring Steve Rogers – but so long as a character is recurring there will always be this tendency to revert to default, especially when multiple creators are involved. It’s already a little surprising that the change in writer/director for Iron Man 3 resulted in a film that keeps so much to the spirit of Jon Favreau’s work on the first two.

The Iron Man trilogy came early in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, at a time when the films didn’t have to feel so clearly a part of a bigger world. That world is there, but the story is Tony Stark’s, and we get three films that are only about Tony Stark. You could begin and end your Marvel watching with just these three and feel like you got a complete story.

*

I’ve been meaning to write this post for a couple of weeks, so I’ve probably forgotten something I meant to say.

Oh, right. The voiceover at the beginning and end was out of place and unnecessary.

Marvel’s Phase One

This post is part of a series I am writing on the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe from Iron Man to Endgame. There will be spoilers for the entire series of films.

With their first six films, Marvel had a simple goal: introduce a number of characters who could carry their own film franchises while also creating a framework for crossover events, much like the annual events that take place in the comics. The first solo films stand on their own, with minor references and the occasional cameo tying them together, and then The Avengers was the one point where it all came together into a single universe.

I can’t help but think some of that initial simplicity has been lost as the Marvel Cinematic Universe has grown. We still get the stand-alone films, but largely for characters who are less important for the crossovers, and the major heroes spend more time in events rather than solo features – Captain America and Thor are the only ones to receive a solo film after Phase Two, and Captain America: Civil War was more of an Avengers film than a Captain America film.

Along with a shift toward solo films as filler and the event films as the main focus, there’s been a tendency to try and tie the various films into part of the overall narrative – what’s now been titled the Infinity Saga. Thanos, of course, first appears in the MCU in the end credits of The Avengers, so his being positioned as the final challenge of the first era of the MCU does make sense on that level, but Phase One itself doesn’t seem like it was made with that in mind. The first mention of the Infinity Stones comes in the end credits of Phase Two’s Thor: The Dark World, in which both the Aether and the Tesseract are established as Infinity Stones. I wouldn’t be surprised if the idea of the Tesseract and Loki’s staff – both of which were important in The Avengers – containing Stones didn’t actually come about until after the film was made, when the people in charge were deciding on a direction for Phase Two. It looks like they wanted to use the Infinity Stones because they were using Thanos, and they didn’t want to have to introduce all the Stones separately, so decided to point at some things that had already been used and say “that’s an Infinity Stone”.

The Tesseract is the one that bothers me. The Cosmic Cube of the comics is an entirely different object with its own power, not connected to the Infinity Gems, and could have served as a macguffin for other narratives not connected to Thanos, but once it was turned into an Infinity Stone, that was it. Maybe the Stones will come back at some point, but it will always be an Infinity Stone and not a Cosmic Cube. Decisions like these can limit the stories they tell in future, and they continue to make them in later films with their tendency to use up and kill off characters who could have been interesting long-running villains.

Speaking of villains, at least one interesting thing from Phase One is that it did leave some villains out there, with the potential to come back. Abomination was alive and in captivity at the end of The Incredible Hulk, while the Red Skull’s fate in Captain America: The First Avenger was ambiguous but looked a lot like he had been transported somewhere in outer space by the Tesseract. It would have been nice to see these get some followup beyond the cursory Red Skull cameo we eventually received in Infinity War and Endgame.

Phase One was not a grand narrative – it was set up, a series of introductions that created the ground on which the future films could build. There was no guarantee it would work, so there wasn’t much reason to spend significant time on setting up future films that might not happen. In that way the success of the MCU has perhaps been a mixed blessing for fans who enjoy stand-alone character driven features. While Phase Two films would continue to mostly stand-alone, the amount of setup they included would increase, to the point that the second Avengers movie suffered heavily for it.

But perhaps that’s not as much of a flaw as it seems. The MCU started with a mixed bag of movies that ranged from good (Iron Man, Captain America) to just okay (The Incredible Hulk, Thor), but they were entertaining enough, and the idea of the shared world, the continuity, may be what kept people coming back for more. It’s certainly what allowed them to branch out into weirder areas like Guardians of the Galaxy in Phase Two. So while I could complain that the need to take decisions one creator makes in a film and shoehorn them into part of a bigger narrative has held individual films back, it could also be argued that it’s better for Marvel to focus on its crossovers and shared narrative, because the big stories and shared universe are what keeps people interested. It hasn’t stopped me being a fan, after all.

I guess I’m getting ahead of myself somewhat; at this point I’m only six films in to the rewatch and have a lot more to go.

One of the interesting things about Phase One is the timeline: the films don’t entirely take place in chronological order, and they happen within a much shorter timeframe than you might expect. While The Incredible Hulk was released only a few months after Iron Man, it actually takes place concurrently with the end of Iron Man 2, which was released two years later. Thor begins immediately after Iron Man 2, meaning three of these six films happen within a single week. Where later films seem to skip ahead months or years at a time, roughly matching their release schedule, the Phase One timeline is very compressed.

After The Avengers, having established their universe, it was time for Marvel Studios to build on that. Phase Two needed to deliver sequels to the Phase One films while also expanding the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and keep audiences from losing interest as things grew beyond the scale of all previous superhero franchises. It’d be pretty easy to screw that up.