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Welcome to the main discussion thread for the Marvel Cinematic Universe! This pinned post is here to establish some basic guidelines. All of the Media Forum rules still apply.

  • This thread is for talking about the live-action films, TV shows, animated works, and related content that use the Marvel brand, currently owned by Disney.
  • While mild digressions are okay, discussion of the comic books should go in this thread. Extended digressions may be thumped as off-topic.
  • Spoilers for new releases should not be discussed without spoiler tagging for at least two weeks. Rather, each title should have a dedicated thread where that sort of conversation is held. We can mention new releases in a general sense, but please be courteous to people who don't want to be spoiled.

If you're posting tagged spoilers, make sure that the film or series is clearly identified outside the spoiler tagging. People need to know what will be spoiled before they choose to read the post.

    Original post 
Since Thor and now Captain America came out this year, I wanted to get what Tropers thought of the concept and execution of the Marvel Cinematic Universe in general. Personally I love the idea and wonder why this idea hasn't been seriously tried before. It sorta seems to me like the DCAU in movie form (And well, ummm, with Marvel), and really 'gets' the comic book feel of a shared universe while not being completely alienating.

Edited by Mrph1 on Jul 29th 2024 at 3:09:00 PM

Tuckerscreator (4 Score & 7 Years Ago) Relationship Status: Drift compatible
#75676: Oct 19th 2017 at 10:19:45 PM

I like it a lot when Shane Black's films do their Cringe Comedy Reality Ensues schtick, like this scene from The Nice Guys. It's just the wrong place in a movie set up as "Iron Man against Bin Laden and his too-real-lifelike terrorist bombings."

I've said it before but it's funny how the fake Ben Kingsley Mandarin was accidentally too charismatic when Marvel was trying to write a generic villain hodgepodge, just before the following films gave the MCU its reputation for generic villains.

Draghinazzo (4 Score & 7 Years Ago) Relationship Status: I get a feeling so complicated...
#75677: Oct 19th 2017 at 10:27:05 PM

It kind of is Mandarin's fault, in a roundabout way: most of the movie is spend setting up Mandarin as the (fake) bad guy, so he gets a lot of personality and gravitas to him, while Killian is off to the side apparently being written as the stiff, emotionless Number Two the audience expects to be taken out by a side character before the end. Then he turns out to be the villain, but they played his previous part to the hilt too well: both Mandarin and Slattery end up being some of the best parts of the movie, while since Killian spent most of it being a creepy side character there's nothing much to him, and there no in-between to really groom him into the big shoes. It just kind of happens.

I actually felt that that the film telegraphed Killian's importance so strongly that it was difficult to imagine that he was not the main villain somehow.

The Mandarin only shows up occasionally to spout anti-west rhetoric and remind the audience he's supposed to be a big important terrorist. Meanwhile, Killian shows up in the intro flashback (with the whole thing implying that he has some big importance to play in the story), has connections to both Tony and Pepper's pasts, and is clearly involved in the whole Extremis thing anyways. I didn't expect the whole "fake mandarin being played a goofy actor" thing, but I WAS expecting Killian to take center stage as the main villain eventually because the whole film builds up to that idea in a very obvious way.

The thematic point being made by the twist (itself one of the few really good things about IM 3) and the surprise was very shortly deflated when it dawned on me "Oh, ok, then Killian has to be the Mandarin...fuck". For all the focus on him, Killian is a really boring, uninteresting character.

edited 19th Oct '17 10:32:26 PM by Draghinazzo

KnownUnknown Since: Jan, 2001
#75678: Oct 19th 2017 at 10:30:17 PM

That's the problem, really. He gets scenes and does stuff, but he doesn't get more than a minion personality. Mandarin gets the personality, but doesn't get the scenes because he's not actually the big bad.

Unsung it's a living from a tenement of clay Since: Jun, 2016
it's a living
#75679: Oct 19th 2017 at 10:34:57 PM

See, if he'd been so boring that it was a character trait unto itself, that could've been something, but he's just kind of there.

Also I kinda feel like calling 'too soon' on a movie that came out in 2013 was in fact the point the character of the Fake Mandarin was there to make— that you've got to start being able to laugh at these things sometime, because if you keep being afraid of terrorists, they do, in fact, win a little.

edited 19th Oct '17 11:56:43 PM by Unsung

TobiasDrake (•̀⤙•́) (Edited uphill both ways) Relationship Status: Arm chopping is not a love language!
(•̀⤙•́)
#75680: Oct 19th 2017 at 10:41:23 PM

I did really like Killian, but I wonder if he might have resonated better with audiences if he was more like Toomes from Spider-Man: Homecoming. I feel like there's a lot of overlap between the two characters, because they're both sliding down the slippery slope more or less by necessity of their business model.

Killian made this fantastic miracle drug that was awesome until people started exploding. To hide his company's involvement in the explosions, he invented a terrorist scapegoat. To keep using the scapegoat, he hired an actor to play the terrorist and pulled strings in Washington to manufacture a war against a fictional nemesis. Killian's master plan isn't a plan, really; just a sequence of increasingly dramatic events undertaken in service of one big lie: "My drug isn't making people explode." It's a cover-up that probably sounded good on paper but by story's end, it's spiraled so far out of control that he is actually committing a terror attack in order to keep selling the illusion.

I see a lot of the same kind of character in Toomes, who similarly wasn't specifically trying for anything major but then shit just kept escalating. But they aren't the same character. There's a moment in Homecoming where Toomes has to deal with a crew member who's threatening to go to the cops in response to being fired. Toomes declares, "No, we can't have that," and grabs a weapon off the bench. He fires it, vaporizing the guy.

A beat passes, and then Toomes privately admits to Mason that he thought that was the anti-gravity gun. He totally did not mean to vaporize that guy. But he totally just vaporized that guy in front of his entire crew, so now he has to sell it.

Instead of his smarmy bastard persona, Killian probably would have been better served to have more moments like that. Humanizing bits that make him relatable as a guy whose "brilliant" idea is spiraling out of control but who is just too goddamn proud to realize that this isn't workable anymore.

My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.
KnownUnknown Since: Jan, 2001
#75681: Oct 19th 2017 at 10:45:58 PM

I agree that Killian's actual scheme is really, really brilliant.

Much like Ultron later on, it deserved a much better climax than the one it got.

Instead of kidnapping the President, inexplicably kidnapping the hero's girlfriend, and playing king of the hill behind an army of flaming goons so Tony and Rhodey can be bad enough dudes to shoot all these bad guys, maybe the thing that ups the stakes should've been that he succeeded - they uncover the Mandarin plot but can't prove it, Extremis is being distributed to innocent people (in this version of events, maybe Tony's fix wasn't quite perfect at first and they realize this and have to correct his error too late), he's going off the deep end from overuse and they have to go rogue and storm the castle alone because otherwise, Killian won. They find him in the throes of a Villainous Breakdown, with everything he dreamed of making is going to fall apart eventually, a corrupted shell of what it was meant to be, Tony and Rhodey just want to fix everything but he won't let Tony swoop in and take over what he built, and there's a nice contrast between letting go of past trauma or not between the two of them, etc, etc.

It would've Civil War later much more awkward, but... I dunno. I think something like that would've worked much better.

edited 19th Oct '17 10:56:25 PM by KnownUnknown

Draghinazzo (4 Score & 7 Years Ago) Relationship Status: I get a feeling so complicated...
#75682: Oct 19th 2017 at 10:46:04 PM

Instead of his smarmy bastard persona, Killian probably would have been better served to have more moments like that. Humanizing bits that make him relatable as a guy whose "brilliant" idea is spiraling out of control but who is just too goddamn proud to realize that this isn't workable anymore.

That would have helped a lot, yes. My main issue is that I felt Killian was very one-dimensional and Guy Pearce was not very good at making his smug persona entertaining to watch. If Killian was written in a more vulnerable and humanizing light like Toomes was, he probably would have been able to sell that a lot better.

edited 19th Oct '17 10:50:59 PM by Draghinazzo

Unsung it's a living from a tenement of clay Since: Jun, 2016
it's a living
#75683: Oct 19th 2017 at 10:49:07 PM

Guy Pearce would've been an excellent choice for an everyman villain, definitely.

edited 19th Oct '17 10:49:15 PM by Unsung

Nightwire Since: Feb, 2010
#75684: Oct 19th 2017 at 10:53:53 PM

Like the Walker brothers once said: "You don't make Guy Pierce your payoff."

Tuckerscreator (4 Score & 7 Years Ago) Relationship Status: Drift compatible
#75685: Oct 19th 2017 at 10:59:08 PM

Also I kinda feel like calling 'too soon' on a movie that came out in 2013 was kind of the point the character of the Fake Mandarin was meant to make— that you've got to start being able to laugh at these things sometime

I did really like Killian, but I wonder if he might have resonated better with audiences if he was more like Toomes from Spider-Man: Homecoming.

I don't think it was merely that the subject matter was Too Soon or Killian being too flat that turned off most viewers. It seems likely to me that part of why the fake Mandarin was so effective to most before the twist was because he tapped into real life fears, unlike Hi-I'm-the-Mandarin-random-business-guy. Those audiences came to see Marvel-Bin-Laden create bombings, not stayed away from the film because of Too Soon, because they wanted to see him then cathartically blown up, for better or worse.

Killian being more relatable like Toomes might've helped redeem him, but he wasn't a character that viewers wanted to whip out their real life axes-to-grind on like Super Osama.

Arguably that's also why the first Iron Man is still rated above its Ant-Man and Doctor Strange clones, not merely for doing the plot first, but also because it delivered the power fantasy of flying overseas and blowing up real life terries... again, for better or worse.

Unsung it's a living from a tenement of clay Since: Jun, 2016
it's a living
#75686: Oct 19th 2017 at 11:01:51 PM

Ahh. Well, I'm sure that hurt the film for some viewers, but I don't think that power fantasy is one that ought to be fed too much more than it already has been, for pretty much the same reasons I've said.

edited 19th Oct '17 11:56:03 PM by Unsung

VeryMelon Since: Jul, 2011 Relationship Status: Anime is my true love
#75687: Oct 19th 2017 at 11:05:46 PM

Anything would be better than the Killian I saw on screen. Flat Character Maya would have been better for fucks sake.

edited 19th Oct '17 11:06:01 PM by VeryMelon

TobiasDrake (•̀⤙•́) (Edited uphill both ways) Relationship Status: Arm chopping is not a love language!
(•̀⤙•́)
#75688: Oct 19th 2017 at 11:10:28 PM

Also, I keep having trouble with not saying Kilgrave instead of Killian.

"HALT EVERYTHING. Colonel Rhodes, please step out of your armor, thank you very much. You over there, pretend like I just breathed fire. It was very scary and you are rather impressed."

My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.
KnownUnknown Since: Jan, 2001
#75689: Oct 19th 2017 at 11:12:57 PM

One of the scariest things about Kilgrave is if he really wanted to, he could've walked to Stark Industries and have been effectively running the country within days. And it's a sign of how well his character was done that it's totally believable that he wouldn't want to do something like that.

edited 19th Oct '17 11:22:51 PM by KnownUnknown

Unsung it's a living from a tenement of clay Since: Jun, 2016
Tuckerscreator (4 Score & 7 Years Ago) Relationship Status: Drift compatible
#75691: Oct 19th 2017 at 11:19:17 PM

Comics Maya was a worthwhile villain, but I think making her effective in the film would require some changes to Tony's character and motives. In the Extremis comic, she and Tony have basically the same goal, to progress human evolution, but Maya through illegal means when years of red tape wear out all her patience.

Tony in the films is very protective of his tech. Minus a few exceptions, his suits are meant to be used for himself only, to keep them out of corrupt hands. Tony in the Extremis comic has the opposite motive. Iron Man is his last weapon to neutralize all other weapons. Eventually, everyone will be Iron Man and no one will have to die. And then, Extremis appears so it turns out there's still a ceiling over Iron Man to get through.

It's not impossible to adapt Tony to such a motive given that the Civil War film plausibly made him the Accords law enforcer, but it would definitely be a big pivot from his earlier claims he broadcast live across the entire USA.

Anomalocaris20 from Sagittarius A* Since: Sep, 2010 Relationship Status: Love blinded me (with science!)
#75692: Oct 19th 2017 at 11:25:40 PM

I don't think he'd have been able to hijack Stark or Rhodes if they're in their suits. His control works via airborne pathogens, and the Iron Man suits are apparently hermetically sealed, given that in Avengers we see Iron Man both deep underwater and in outer space.

...Speaking of the latter, if the hole the Tesseract opened above New York is a portal to deep space that allows matter to pass in and out, shouldn't it have started sucking all the air out of the atmosphere?

You cannot firmly grasp the true form of Squidward's technique!
KnownUnknown Since: Jan, 2001
#75693: Oct 19th 2017 at 11:27:48 PM

They wouldn't need to be in their suits. All he would need to do is get someone in Stark Industries to introduce him to Pepper, ensure anyone who would have a problem with that suddenly thinks it's a fine idea, then have Pepper introduce him to Tony and Tony introduce him to the rest of the Avengers + his many contacts in the government, etc.

His total anonymity is the best weapon here: nobody in the MCU knew or seriously believed he existed until after he was killed, and iirc he's chronologically the first person with such potent mass mind control powers anyone in the MCU has had to deal with, so he could blindside basically everybody.

As long as Tony and Rhodey are snagged out of their suits, they're good for a good length of time - far long enough for them to do his bidding and then come back to him for a refresher.

edited 19th Oct '17 11:29:53 PM by KnownUnknown

Anomalocaris20 from Sagittarius A* Since: Sep, 2010 Relationship Status: Love blinded me (with science!)
#75694: Oct 19th 2017 at 11:31:14 PM

Oh, I'm aware, it's just that the example scenario had Kilgrave ordering Rhodes out of his suit.

Also, attempting to take over the whole Avengers team is going to get stonewalled hard by Vision, who would likely just lazer Kilgrave's head off once he figures things out.

You cannot firmly grasp the true form of Squidward's technique!
TobiasDrake (•̀⤙•́) (Edited uphill both ways) Relationship Status: Arm chopping is not a love language!
(•̀⤙•́)
#75695: Oct 19th 2017 at 11:33:15 PM

Kilgrave controlling the world's leaders, Avengers, and/or law enforcement groups like S.H.I.E.L.D. strikes me as a plan that has too many moving parts to ultimately work out well. There are so many people he'd have to keep permanently under his control, constantly refreshing, that he's bound to eventually miss one.

Even just one Avenger, world leader, or S.H.I.E.L.D. agent coming free would be the death of him. High risk and ultimately minimal reward when he can instead just live like a king as an urban legend.

edited 19th Oct '17 11:34:00 PM by TobiasDrake

My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.
KarkatTheDalek Not as angry as the name would suggest. from Somwhere in Time/Space Since: Mar, 2012 Relationship Status: You're a beautiful woman, probably
Not as angry as the name would suggest.
#75696: Oct 19th 2017 at 11:34:16 PM

[up][up] Always have a robot on your team, kids.

edited 19th Oct '17 11:34:47 PM by KarkatTheDalek

Oh God! Natural light!
Tuckerscreator (4 Score & 7 Years Ago) Relationship Status: Drift compatible
#75697: Oct 19th 2017 at 11:46:55 PM

...Speaking of the latter, if the hole the Tesseract opened above New York is a portal to deep space that allows matter to pass in and out, shouldn't it have started sucking all the air out of the atmosphere?

One could probably handwave it as there being a barrier that prevents air from leaking out or the Chitauri army being an environment with foreign atmosphere.

But if you want to get really technical, a giant wormhole in the sky wouldn't suck all the Earth's air away. Probably just enough to make people in Manhattan lightheaded, but the suction would stop once there's enough pressure on the other side of the portal from all the siphoned air that's just floating around outside it.

Ikedatakeshi Baby dango from singapore Since: Nov, 2015 Relationship Status: Singularity
Baby dango
#75698: Oct 20th 2017 at 12:01:01 AM

The reason why the air isn't sucked into the portal is the same reason why our atmosphere isn't dispersing into the vacuum of space.

Anomalocaris20 from Sagittarius A* Since: Sep, 2010 Relationship Status: Love blinded me (with science!)
#75699: Oct 20th 2017 at 12:02:00 AM

[up][up]But the air wouldn't just be floating around outside the portal, it'd be sucked out with high velocity and then in deep space have nothing to stop its momentum, no?

Admittedly, my understanding of physics where hypothetical portals are involved is mediocre at best. I need to intern at Apeture Science when I get the chance.

[up]Because it's a gradual transition from our atmosphere to space, so gravity retains it. But this is suddenly opening a path between the dense lower atmosphere and the near-empty void of deep space.

edited 20th Oct '17 12:03:51 AM by Anomalocaris20

You cannot firmly grasp the true form of Squidward's technique!
Unsung it's a living from a tenement of clay Since: Jun, 2016
it's a living
#75700: Oct 20th 2017 at 12:04:21 AM

It could still be sucked out, just not with as much force as you're probably thinking, in pretty much the same ways that Explosive Decompression and Continuous Decompression are exaggerated in the movies.

...I would imagine. Physics isn't my subject, either.

edited 20th Oct '17 12:06:58 AM by Unsung


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