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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

KnownUnknown Since: Jan, 2001
#83027: Mar 18th 2018 at 3:18:28 PM

Whoever made that chose the best stills for everybody. Everyone has a great "the fuck am I doing here?" expression on their face.

Except Sam. And Stan. They're having the time of their lives.

Hodor2 Since: Jan, 2015
#83028: Mar 18th 2018 at 3:19:24 PM

@Sigilbreaker-

Yeah. I think Loki's MO is basically "if you can't win a fair fight, make sure you are fighting an unfair one". Having watched Ragnarok last night, I got the impression (that in keeping with the movie's greater magical/mythological focus) that Loki maybe had spells he could have used against Strange, but Strange was way too fast for him to use any of them.

Also, random observation, but I was surprised how in the "Tragedy of Loki" play, they show how Loki is actually blue. I thought that everyone had forgotten about that, so I'm impressed with Waiti's skilled use of continuity. Also kind of interesting character-wise in terms of the idea (suggested by someone on the Fridge Brilliance page) that Loki is to some extent more self-aware/ repentant at this point.

edited 18th Mar '18 3:19:57 PM by Hodor2

PushoverMediaCritic I'm sorry Tien, but I must go all out. from the Italy of America Since: Jul, 2015 Relationship Status: watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ
I'm sorry Tien, but I must go all out.
#83029: Mar 18th 2018 at 3:20:26 PM

I was hoping that Infinity War would be three hours long, but I guess I can accept 2 hours and 36 minutes.

I actually do want the ending of this film to be that Thanos is just barely beaten because no-one knows where the Soul Stone is, and a major part of Avengers 4 is trying to find the Soul Stone and keep Thanos away from it.

slimcoder The Head of the Hydra Since: May, 2013
The Head of the Hydra
#83030: Mar 18th 2018 at 3:22:35 PM

[up][up][up][up] That.... is....... beautiful.

"I am Alpharius. This is a lie."
Draghinazzo (4 Score & 7 Years Ago) Relationship Status: I get a feeling so complicated...
#83031: Mar 18th 2018 at 5:00:07 PM

I just finished re-watching The Incredible Hulk with some other tropers and I now remember why this film made no impression on me at all and was one of the three-punch that led me to quitting the MCU for a while.

The script sucks. Every character except Blonsky is poorly defined and incredibly bland, meaning there's no real investment to be had anywhere. We're just thrown straight into the action and expected to care about what's going despite the fact that the direction and scripwriting are worksmanlike at best and downright incompetent at worst. Not that the material he was working with was any good, but Edward Norton feels miscast and is completely phoning his performance in. Gaon summed up Betty in this movie by saying her emotional state mostly varies between "crying or nearly crying" which makes her an incredibly flat character, and her romance with Bruce was no weight to it at all. Ross meanwhile is a huge asshole but to the point he doesn't even seem to care that he puts his own daughter in danger, which just doesn't really jive with what his character is supposed to be.

There's maybe like 2 or 3 scenes which are somewhat enjoyable and get a reaction from me other than frustration or boredom, but otherwise there's nothing really all that salvageable from this movie other than Tim Roth doing his best with the incredibly lackluster material he's being given.

Before, based on my vague recollections from when I saw it in theaters, I would have told you it was just an average nothingburger movie. That's still largely my opinion after seeing it again except it's actually worse than I remember it being, somehow.

shatterstar Since: Apr, 2015 Relationship Status: I wanna know about these strangers like me
#83032: Mar 18th 2018 at 5:10:00 PM

Here's an interview with Joe Russo. One of my takeaway is that the film is closer to the second trailer in which Thanos, Gamora and Thor will be the emotional core and undergo character development in Infinity War. Hope that the Russo Brother pulled something similar with Gamora like they did with Black Widow.

AdricDePsycho Rock on, Gold Dust Woman from Never Going Back Again Since: Oct, 2014 Relationship Status: [TOP SECRET]
Rock on, Gold Dust Woman
#83033: Mar 18th 2018 at 5:31:15 PM

To add to Draghinazzo's post, having the Hulk's origin shoved into nearly five minutes of a montage, while effective enough to get those details to the audience given how widely known Hulk's origin is, does nothing to effectively establish any of the major characters. The film wastes it's time and just expects us to buy these characters without giving any establishing scene for them. Meanwhile, Ross is a complete idiot whose troops outright make things worse and are ineffective as fuck. You know how people always joke about how the military in Godzilla movies are stupid because they always shoot at the giant fucking kaiju that is immune to bullets? That's the army with the Hulk in this movie.

Also, Tim Blake Nelson was seriously miscast as Samuel Sterns. On the unlikely chance they bring back The Leader, they need to get someone else to play him. Keep Tim Roth if he's open to playing Abomination again, he deserved better.

Have you any dreams you'd like to sell?
Ultimatum Disasturbator from the Amiga Forest (Old as dirt) Relationship Status: Who needs love when you have waffles?
Disasturbator
#83034: Mar 18th 2018 at 6:02:31 PM

I've not seen the Rebooted Hulk film they did,but I have seen that god awful Hulk film Ang lee directed,was it any better?

have a listen and have a link to my discord server
AdricDePsycho Rock on, Gold Dust Woman from Never Going Back Again Since: Oct, 2014 Relationship Status: [TOP SECRET]
Rock on, Gold Dust Woman
#83035: Mar 18th 2018 at 6:03:08 PM

No. The Ang Lee film had decent ideas with shite execution and a genuinely good score.

Have you any dreams you'd like to sell?
Draghinazzo (4 Score & 7 Years Ago) Relationship Status: I get a feeling so complicated...
#83036: Mar 18th 2018 at 6:24:57 PM

If you thought the ang lee hulk film was bad this film is even worse. At least the ang lee hulk film is ambitious and properly establishes characters. This film is nothing of the sort. It is a big nothing.

XJTordecai Watch the seventh wave Since: Jun, 2013
Watch the seventh wave
#83037: Mar 18th 2018 at 6:41:30 PM

I never did watch TIH, and, well, your thoughts aren't too encouraging. At least we have Thor: Ragnarok now.

On my wave, passing oooooooon
KJMackley Since: Jan, 2001
#83038: Mar 18th 2018 at 7:33:56 PM

The Incredible Hulk is better paced than the '03 Hulk film, and thus more of a crowd pleaser, but it is a lot more generic. It rehashes the standard "Hulk vs military" stuff and then gives him another CG monster to trade punches with. Hulk is overly long, makes some questionable creative choices and some spotty CG at times, but it has a number of very imaginative sequences and never loses the characters.

Whowho Since: May, 2012
#83039: Mar 18th 2018 at 7:37:23 PM

The score for Angus Lee's Hulk is amazing. Possibly one of the best superhero soundtracks. And I'll almost certainly never hear it again on the silver screen.

TobiasDrake (•̀⤙•́) (Edited uphill both ways) Relationship Status: Arm chopping is not a love language!
(•̀⤙•́)
#83040: Mar 18th 2018 at 8:11:38 PM

To be fair to people shooting at the Hulk and/or giant kaiju, it's hard to tell the difference between immune to bullets and resistant to bullets.

Wear and tear is a thing, after all. Nothing can really be immune to harm. However, when it would take more bullets to actually bring down the Hulk than can feasibly delivered before he neutralizes the source of those bullets, then it's just not a very effective strategy.

But it's also difficult to know that without testing. How many bullets would it take to punch a hole in the Hulk's armored hide? Hell if I know. But if the Hulk's coming at me and all I've got is a gun, all I can really do is hope I've got enough.

edited 18th Mar '18 8:12:50 PM by TobiasDrake

My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.
AdricDePsycho Rock on, Gold Dust Woman from Never Going Back Again Since: Oct, 2014 Relationship Status: [TOP SECRET]
Rock on, Gold Dust Woman
#83041: Mar 18th 2018 at 8:31:49 PM

The bullets are shown to literally bounce off of him several times. I'd think that once they saw their rounds just fall onto the ground like pebbles they'd probably try for stronger stuff. Unfortunately said stronger stuff didn't really seem to work, like, at all.

Also, little thing about the opening...so once Banner turned into the Hulk, he apparently travels from Brazil to Guatemala. Evidently the director was as bad at geography as Michael Bay because Banner starts the film in around Rio de Janeiro (about southeast Brazil, like literally around the coast) and would have had to travel through Colombia, Panama, Costa Rica, and Honduras before entering Guatemala, all approximately in a day or so. Even with how strong Hulk is, the sheer distance he'd have had to travel there would most likely have led to him reverting back to Banner before he even made it to the Colombian border. Until Ragnarok, Bruce generally spends less than a day at any given period as the Hulk. Even if he lasted for more than that length of time, you'd think these countries would probably have reports of a huge muscular green rage man with an emo cut (seriously fuck the Hulk's haircut in that movie) running around in several countries right after Ross engaged with said beast in Brazil.

Have you any dreams you'd like to sell?
TobiasDrake (•̀⤙•́) (Edited uphill both ways) Relationship Status: Arm chopping is not a love language!
(•̀⤙•́)
#83042: Mar 18th 2018 at 8:43:10 PM

We see his skin ripple from the gunfire. That means the bullets are doing something, even if they're not getting through. Sustained fire might actually do some harm.

Also, just because they can't penetrate the skin doesn't mean the impact isn't doing something underneath. Like. A bullet still hurts like hell when it hits you even if it can't pierce your flak vest. That's because the impact still did some damage even though the bullet wasn't able to penetrate.

It also did some damage to the vest. Despite the moniker of being "bulletproof", body armor can't hold up against multiple shots to the same place. It was never designed to. Put enough bullets into it and it will eventually fail. Just because it's sturdy enough to handle one shot doesn't mean it can handle one hundred shots.

It's the same principle. The Hulk being able to resist being shot doesn't mean "Bullets are useless! Abandon all hope! Nothing can stop the beast!" It means you need more dakka.

My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.
AdricDePsycho Rock on, Gold Dust Woman from Never Going Back Again Since: Oct, 2014 Relationship Status: [TOP SECRET]
Rock on, Gold Dust Woman
#83043: Mar 18th 2018 at 8:49:06 PM

I don't remember them being able to scratch him that much but you do have a point. Would still be a pain in the ass to figure out how much dakka until they can do anything effective, I'd think.

Have you any dreams you'd like to sell?
NativeJovian Jupiterian Local from Orlando, FL Since: Mar, 2014 Relationship Status: Maxing my social links
Jupiterian Local
#83044: Mar 18th 2018 at 8:51:52 PM

Just finished rewatching Thor. Impressive how Natalie Portman gets more screentime than anyone in the movie except Thor himself, but still manages to be utterly irrelevant to the plot. Seriously. She contributes absolutely nothing to events besides "thinks Thor is hot".

I'm also not thrilled about the whole Asgardian aesthetic. They're magic spacefuture vikings. Like, pick one, maybe? Thor tells Jane that in Asgard, magic and science are one in the same. So, Sufficiently Advanced Technology? I can get behind that. Asgardians are just normal people, except with superscience (beyond even normal MCU Tony Stark level superscience). Except that's not really how it's portrayed? It's more like "they're Asgardians, and Asgardians have superpowers, that's just how it works". (Whether this only applies to "warriors" like Thor, Odin, Loki et al, or even "civilian" Asgardians are superheroes by Earth standards is left unexplored.) I don't really have a problem with Asgardians being straight magic instead of super-advanced science, either, but then you have to explain how their magic works (ie, where their powers come from), and no one ever does. The whole thing is sort of half-baked.

Anyway, Heimdal is the best part of the movie and absolutely steals every scene he's in. Odin is also really solid, and Loki is good too even though his plan is basically "lie to people" and when people find out he's lied to them (by, you know, talking to anyone other than Loki) he doesn't really know what to do about it. Other than that, largely meh. Even the fight scenes weren't that good, but at the same time, it was still pretty watchable. So Okay, It's Average, for the most part.

Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.
KnownUnknown Since: Jan, 2001
#83045: Mar 18th 2018 at 10:25:51 PM

IIRC, Avengers has a good example of Hulk starting out as “bah, puny lasers” but starting to get worn down as the shots piled up against the Chitauri.

As for Jane, she’s one of Marvel’s biggest suffers of Marvel’s traditionalism in writing female leads as love interests and attaches first, characters second. She doesn’t get to do anything in the first movie because they instead have her solely characterized as the person Thor falls in love with. In the second they pull her into a niche that serves her only as a feisty victim for Thor to save while giving what otherwise would’ve been a great plot for her to Selvig instead.

comicwriter Since: Sep, 2011
#83046: Mar 18th 2018 at 11:05:20 PM

It is a real shame that they shat the bed with Jane so badly, especially when the comics are just finishing doing some very interesting things with her.

The romance plots are an area the MCU movies almost consistently fuck up (with the exception of Pepper and Tony, as well as Steve and Peggy, IMO). One of the understated things Black Panther did well IMO was have the love interest plotline not be a complete trainwreck for once.

AdricDePsycho Rock on, Gold Dust Woman from Never Going Back Again Since: Oct, 2014 Relationship Status: [TOP SECRET]
Rock on, Gold Dust Woman
#83047: Mar 18th 2018 at 11:15:51 PM

We also did a rewatch of Iron Man 2 today as well after watching The Incredible Hulk, by the by. After that big green shitfest, it was a big improvement, but it's still a bit frustrating how cluttered and bloated it is. Vanko had the workings of a genuinely good villain and truth be told, the first act of the film up to after Tony visits Vanko in his cell is genuinely good stuff. Vanko had the potential to be a good antagonist and frankly some of his scenes in the first act aren't all that bad. The opening scene where he's introduced is good (and again, show don't tell is in full effect there), and his motivation in the first act makes some sense, plus he does play off of Tony pretty well in the jail scene. It's just...everything afterwards is where he goes to pot.

Once he escapes prison and works with Hammer, he's somewhat funny in some moments (usually when he's trolling Hammer) but Mickey Rourke is shafted and the character gets turned into a generic evil doer. It doesn't help that, for all of him talking about "making God bleed", his actions aren't shown to tie in as much with Tony's struggles with his mortality. He's disconnected from Tony's own problems for most of the film, and they cut out a lot of potential screen time for him that could've been used to develop him. Plus his suit at the end is just dumb and boring looking. Like a discount Iron Monger. His basic whip look from earlier in the movie looked a whole lot better.

Really, the film is too bloated and confused. Hammer is humorous in some scenes but they overdo him a bit and he really could've been trimmed down or cut out of the film altogether. He doesn't contribute a whole lot. Meanwhile they kinda amp Tony's antics up to the point where in some parts he's outright unsympathetic. Like, yeah, I get he's an egotist who's right now riding a bit high with the Iron Man biz, but it makes him become more annoying in the first third. The tonal clashes as well lead to Tony's drunken episode, something that should have been played more seriously, being used as an excuse for some juvenile, cringy humor and then him fighting Rhodey because it's a bit obligatory something (actually speaking of Rhodey, I dig Cheadle but he seems a bit wooden when he's reading his lines inside of the armor, sounds like he wasn't used to doing that). He never even tells Pepper he was dying until around the end of the movie.

Adding to that is some of the improv scenes that are clearly meant to recapture the first movie's lightning in the bottle are too long and drone on too much with pointless humor that should've been trimmed. The one scene with Tony trying to talk to Pepper in her office is one of the more egregious moments, for example, as is Tony and Rhodey's conversation before fighting with the Hammer drones. The first film had some fairly quick pacing that made it breeze by fairly nicely while keeping the comedic improv pieces tight, but here these scene just drags for about five minutes while adding nothing to the film but padding.

Also, Black Widow in here...I can criticize Whedon's portrayal of her a good deal but Favreau wrote her even worse. Some of the scenes involving her were just bad, bad, bad. She's flat, lacks any of her personality established in The Avengers and Winter Soldier, and the one gratuitous shot of her getting undressed in the back of Happy's car before her big action scene is just...ugh. Plus she kind of enables Tony to go on his drunken escapade too? Really some of the stuff with her and Nick Fury seemed shoved in to hype up The Avengers but it didn't really add a whole lot to the movie.

There's some strong scenes here, don't get me wrong. The scene of Tony watching his dad's video was genuinely good, and John Slattery was a good choice to play old Howard Stark. As I said, Vanko genuinely starts off strong in the first act up to just after he's thrown in jail. Rourke seemed to actually be trying with this role, compared to Guy Pierce's miscasting and poorly written excuse of a character in Iron Man 3. But it's clear this needed some rewrites and some tightening up of the plot to make it work better. It's a flawed follow up that could've been much better.

Have you any dreams you'd like to sell?
unknowing from somewhere.. Since: Mar, 2014
#83048: Mar 19th 2018 at 12:07:11 AM

Adric:i feel iron man 2 fall in tony party, when is antic grow annoying, vanko is push on the background and tony get away with s shit thanks to an asspull.

"My Name is Bolt, Bolt Crank and I dont care if you believe or not"
windleopard from Nigeria Since: Nov, 2014 Relationship Status: Non-Canon
#83049: Mar 19th 2018 at 12:20:18 AM

I'll say this about Ang Lee's Hulk; their version of Thaddeus Ross is much better than the MCU version. Or even the comic version.

Notoyax17 When all you have is a blowtorch... Since: Feb, 2011 Relationship Status: I've got a total eclipse of the heart
When all you have is a blowtorch...
#83050: Mar 19th 2018 at 12:50:28 AM

[up][up][up] It's been a while since I've seen IM 2, but I think Tony was supposed to be intentionally acting like an asshole for large parts of the beginning (though some certainly was just Tony being Tony). IIRC, it was a him not wanting them to feel too much pain when he died (since he was starting to consider it a "when" not an "if") and to force them into a position without too much guilt and without the excess stress that would have occurred had it been done after his death (legal battles, etc won't be as likely since they'll have had the suit/business for several months/a year prior to his passing, making it clear that it was intentional and allowed.

"Yo, those kids are straight up liars, man. All I told them to do was run product. And by product, I mean chewing gum."

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