Marvel Cinematic Universe

1. Stane/Iron Monger was the best and honestly most memorable villain in the Iron Man movies in my opinion.
2. Zeke would be the best bet for an antagonist in Iron Man 4, especially after the Ultron disaster Tony will have a hand in.

Wait, what? You've never seen The Big Lebowski? Or Tron?

edited 8th Oct '14 6:23:33 PM by Wackd

@Wack'd, Tron was so awful, boring and unmemorable that frankly I can barely tell that Jeff Bridges was in it at all and really, I can't really call what I did watching. I mean, I saw the entire film, I understood most of it but... I mean, I couldn't absorb it. I mean, I saw it, but do want to admit that to be world or myself? What did I accmplish in seeing it besides cool visual effects?

And dude, you already knew I never saw the Big Lebowski. You've already ts me off for it and I do feel slightly ashamed that it is a cultural touchstone I have no had the time nor interest to pursue, but I will eventually.

edited 8th Oct '14 6:30:33 PM by MousaThe14

I've never seen The Big Lebowski or Tron.

It's not so ridiculous.

Me neither.

Yeah, but I've actually been making a semi-attempt to watch these cultural touchstones even if it was later in my life than my peers. Including the Star Wars trilogy, the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Fight Club, Pulp Fiction, Groundhog Day, Ghostbusters, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Firefly, all of which I witnessed for the first time within the past 5 years.

edited 8th Oct '14 6:38:58 PM by MousaThe14

I've never seen The Big Lebowski but I've heard of tron and I played a level based on it in Kingdom Hearts II.

The Big Lebowski's pretty good, though I should warn you, there will be some loose ends...sort of.

edited 8th Oct '14 6:36:40 PM by KarkatTheDalek

You guys saying Stane was memorable are fans with a vested interest in this franchise. In other words, and I say this lovingly, film and/or comicbook nerds. The movie came out six years ago. We talk about these movies everyday online. Other people barely know any real names besides Tony Stark, because that one's been shoved in their faces for 6+ years. Plus Stane didn't have a whole lot of screen time as it is.

He was fairly memorable. The problem is that nowadaways people's judgement of "memorable comic book villains" is "Joker and Loki" and "Not Joker and Loki, therefore forgettable".

That is definitely true. The bar has been set a note high where charisma and a compelling performance isn't enough. You also need to be flashy, hammy, funny, sarcastic, make big explosions, also be mysterious and damaged, oh and a ridiculous costume of course, preferably with green. And if your a for is young and pretty, then it's all the better, isn't it? Oh right, and your body count had to be ungodly.

A year spent watching Venture Brothers, RVB, Pulp Fiction, and doing a hella other stuff. Make no mistake, Lebowski is on my to-do list but my memory is SUPER crappy and I am VERY easily distracted.

There was also all that Star Trek I watched.

And my current ongoing obsession with the Thrilling Adventure Hour? Technically your fault. I am under onus to you for helping me find it but you are under onus to me for making me obsessed. The onus has probably been accounted for and equalized. Bonus Onus.

edited 8th Oct '14 7:04:58 PM by MousaThe14

You don't like Tron?! What blasphemy is this?!

In all seriousness though, I've noticed that some don't exactly think that the idea of a shared universe works, because it begs the question as to why the heroes can't just ask each other for help. Like, in The Winter Soldier, why couldn't Steve ask Bruce Banner to help him out?

Have you actually watched that movie without nostalgia goggles from the perspective of of a modern audience? That film is dishwater dull. Hell, I'm a member of the modern audience and I think original series Star Trek was fantastic, cheesiness and all. But Tron is a legitmately uninteresting movie.

That whole "if we're out in he open for too long then SHEILD/Hydra's advanced's surveillence will find us and get us murdered" sort of deal probably prevented them from trying to contact anyone like Bruce.

edited 9th Oct '14 2:34:27 AM by MousaThe14

Well, maybe some people enjoy Tron on its own merits. I wouldn't know, I haven't seen either movies.

Anyway, I don't know whether you've seen this, but here's a clip from The Big Lebowski that I like. It might help you gauge your interest. Warning: NSFW (that goes for most of the movie, actually).

edited 9th Oct '14 2:48:10 AM by KarkatTheDalek

Still, wouldn't Hulk be able to shrug off Hydra's attacks? So if they got to him quickly enough, he could protect them.

Still can't access streaming media. Maybe tomorrow when I'm actually at my own house again. Also, Tron has mertis?

True, but I guess it also depends on how quickly they would be able to get to Bruce's location. We don't know if the know where he lives and even if he was in Stark Tower, that's still a two hour drive on a good day to NYC.

Oh, right. I forgot.

I don't think that a good villain has to be flashy to work. Alexander Pierce might be the best Villain in the MCU (if you see Loki more as personified chaos than a straightforward villain...I am never sure about his true motives, which in the end, is what makes him so interesting), and he is not flashy at all. But he is smart, he has a plan which very nearly works, and I get why he does what he does.

Leaving out Thanos (because he is currently more "the emperor"....some guy who is looming in the background), Loki and Nebula (because her story has just begun), the best villains in the MCU are for me:

Alexander Piers (honestly, he turned up and I immediately thought "he is the most likely candidate for the bad guy...but he played the role of the good guy so convincing that I started to wonder if he might be a red herring after all...that's how good he was written).

Ronan the Accuser (not the most layered villain, but I DO get why he does what he does, he does have a plan which nearly works and he is threatening enough).

Red Scull (who looses some points for being utterly crazy and sometimes a little bit too over the top).

Obadiah Stane (who comes very close to working, but I just can't get over the fact that I can't believe Tony falling for this smarmy guy).

And Justin Hammer (who is at least entertaining, but should have been shown as a little bit smarter to make it believable that this guy is a business rival of Tony Stark).

All the other villains, I don't get. They are contrived, flashy but without substance and in the case of Raza, totally under-utilized. Never got why Raza didn't get more dialogue with Tony, or why they didn't allow him to survive the first movie so that he could be the big bad in Iron Man 2.

...so, a supervillain, then.

When you get right down to it, people like characters who feel real. People like new, but more importantly, people like believable. People are tired of the one-note Bad Guy. Loki is easily lovable because he's charmingly pathetic, and people don't expect that in a main villain; instead of a powerful and defiant master planner, he comes off more like he could be that friend from school that everyone picks on. Even if you don't know him, you'd kind of want to root for him if he didn't keep killing people.

Most importantly, you can believe a person like Loki existing.His motivations, personal tics, etc. feel real. He serves double duty as a charming and witty villain, and also as a power fantasy for kids who fancy themselves an underdog - because, when you get right down to it, that's exactly what he is, and that's really where "new" comes in; Loki, the villain, is the downtrodden underdog. At no point does he ever truly seem to be in control and, more often than not, he just feels thoroughly outmatched by the people he's going against.

Hammer is memorable because he's a silly, self-involved dipshit with no Hidden Depths or true reveal of how secretly dangerous he actually was all along; on the surface, he seems like a shallow, pretentious ass, but when you get deeper into his true master plans...he's still a shallow, pretentious ass. He's barely even a villain; just an idiot with eyes bigger than his stomach, and if left to his own devices, utterly and completely harmless.

Pierce is memorable because he feels genuine. When he says that what he's doing is for the best, he really, truly seems to believe it. Even as a villain, Pierce presents himself as the Hero of Another Story, and while at some points the audience may be waiting on the edge of their seat for him to reveal his true villainous motivations, ripping off his mask and going, "HAHAHA, it's the Red Skull, sucker! Time for an Evil Party!" he never does. He goes to his grave firmly believing that what he was trying to do was right; that his actions would bring peace and prosperity to the world.

I don't know, I'm kind of rambling, but the point is, when Marvel's villains work, they f*cking work, and often enough, the difference between whether they work or fail is a question of how well you can believe this person existing. Are they a Person who happens to do Villainous things, or a Villain with some Person traits to them?

edited 9th Oct '14 8:01:19 AM by TobiasDrake

I agree....and really thinking about it...Justin Hammer's action don't really fit his goal. So he breaks this guy out of prison, not caring for who will get hurt or killed in the process, and what is the goal in all this? Presenting something really impressive at the expo. That's it! In fact, the breaking out and harbouring a dangerous fugitive is all he does which is even illegal (and I guess that's what he got prison time for). Presenting drones is not, and he was not the one who reprogrammed them.

And you know what, him being pathetic would be more impressive if Whiplash would take the mantel of the dangerous enemy. But he is even worse. He manages to replicate the technology the whole world wants, and what is he doing with it? Powering some whips, trying to kill Tony and landing himself in prison. If not for the most pathetic CEO ever he would still be behind bars. But he could hardly predict that Justin Hammer would want him to built anything for the Expo. (Never mind that Whiplash motives for hating Tony in the first place are more than contrived).

Whiplash doesn't hate Tony, he hates Howard. Tony was just part of Howard's legacy, along with the Stark Expo, so he had to go for Vanko to complete his vengeance on Howard.

As far as being a good, compelling villain goes, Vanko shot himself in the foot by targeting Tony, specifically. Lacking any good reason to justify a grudge against Tony, specifically, means he shouldn't be targeting Tony, specifically. Throughout the film, he's supposed to be brilliant - he made the drones, he hacked Hammer's software effortlessly, he created an Arc Reactor in a shed with a box of scraps - but he behaves like a brutish thug with no thought to anything but punching Tony really hard in the face.

That's where Vanko falls apart: he has all the makings of a great character, and he wastes them on behaving Villainous with a capital V. He throws his intelligence out the window to try and murder Tony with his bare hands when there's no good reason to do so on two separate occasions, because establishing him as The Bad Guy was more important than making him a genuine threat to Tony on a level we haven't seen yet: intellectually.

Malekith is probably the best example of a wasted villain. Has there ever, in the entire MCU, been less effort put into a villain's character than Malekith? In the comics, this guy is simultaneously terrifying and hilarious; a light-hearted murderous bastard from a race so devoted to violence that they are constantly at war with each other, prancing about with a big, sharp implement and a Slasher Smile singing elfin songs of blood and mayhem. This guy is a goddamn Horror Villain, up there with Jason Voorhees and Freddie Krueger. He's the Joker of Asgard as played by Legolas.

And in the movie...he's the Bad Guy. That is literally all there is to be said about film Malekith. There is nothing more to his character or his motivations or his personality. He's the Bad Guy. He exists to get Thor and Loki to fight him.

edited 9th Oct '14 8:21:54 AM by TobiasDrake

I saw it differently.

He saw Tony as the Legacy of Howard Stark, and he saw Iron Man as a part of that Legacy; probably the biggest part, given that the suit seems to have gained Tony a massive amount of prestige and even more fame than before.

He mentions making gods bleed. He doesn't need to kill Tony. He needs to kill the Stark Legacy, and what better way to do that than to kill the crown jewel, The Iron Man?

Yes, that was his stated motivation, but as Stark points out when he talks to him in prison, it's really dumb. That's the problem with Vanko's character: he has a decent backstory, he has plenty of intelligence, he even has a solid motivation, but his actions are hollow because he behaves like a thug, trying to bludgeon his superhero of choice with a rock because he has a mad-on for Stark's dad.

On paper, Vanko has all the components he needs to be a great villain, but he makes terrible use of them. He's too angry to be great; all he can think of is KILL STARK KILL STARK KILL STARK. It is the beginning and the end of his existence, his sole motivation, his sole desire, his sole reason for existing. His impressive backstory and intellect end up going to waste on a character with about as much depth of personality as the alleyway muggers that superheroes regularly beat up in the Cold Open.

edited 9th Oct '14 8:42:05 AM by TobiasDrake