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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.
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    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

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#93627: Jan 3rd 2019 at 7:35:22 AM

I had a thought regarding Ultron.

Basically, the issue with Ultron is that the audience is never really sold on how threatening the narrative wants him to be. And this is in large part because he consistently fails to menace the Avengers.

Before the Avengers go into hiding, they have two fights with Ultron. One at Avengers Tower and another in South Africa. The Avengers clean his clock both times. In the first battle, they're unarmed and surprised, yet still manage to bring down all four of the drones Ultron hits them with. Stark and Rhodey don't even manage to suit up and they still win the day handily enough.

The battle in Johannesburg breaks down into a 1v1 duel between Stark and Ultron while the Avengers fight the twins, and Stark wins that. Straight up 100% wins it. Ultron's only able to get away with the vibranium because he deploys a second body to steal it while the fight's happening; the actual duel between him and Stark ends with Ultron smashed to bits on the ground.

And. Like. He knew that. He planned this. He had that second body doing that because Ultron was well aware that his chances of winning the fight were infinitesimal. He knows that he's too weak to ever threaten even Iron Man, let alone all of the Avengers. It's built into the plot.

But that doesn't segue very well into the Avengers going into hiding for fear of Ultron coming for them. Like. The film wants Ultron at this point to be a dangerous threat, but the opportunity to make him one has long passed. Ship's sailed. He's the underdog. And for the rest of the film, even after building his vibranium body, he never recovers from that underlying impression that the Avengers could stomp his useless ass in a heartbeat.

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Swanpride Since: Jun, 2013
#93628: Jan 3rd 2019 at 7:56:46 AM

[up] Yep, that is exactly the problem. The Avengers get defeated in the movie, but by Wanda, not by Ultron. The moment Wanda switches side, they have already won.

unknowing from somewhere.. Since: Mar, 2014
#93629: Jan 3rd 2019 at 8:05:33 AM

Since im not going to mass quote, let cut this:

-Like M84 siad, Cross have more issue with Hank than Scott and Scott barely have any personal stake into the plot, Hela being Thor sister barely got conexion aside from couple of dialogue and Ronan dosent even remenber Drax.

-Saying loki plan wasnt to divide the team literaly goes against what we saw in the film, aside of faking surrender, to wait for the moment and using Clint.

[up]That come to climax, that is the moment were Ultron really need to show what he got and what he got is....a mook zerg rush, is like throwing puties to power rangers and expecting that to work or just using more droids with the jedis, we all know how that is going to end, the lack of actual confrontation between Ultron and the avenger really harm is threat level.

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Swanpride Since: Jun, 2013
#93630: Jan 3rd 2019 at 8:13:43 AM

Ronan might not remember Drax, but he is actually a good cautionary tale for Drax. Remember why Ronan is doing what he is doing? Because he wants revenge on the Xandarians who, in his mind, killed all his ancestors.

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#93631: Jan 3rd 2019 at 8:18:43 AM

I have not seen Thor 2, but I have seen TIH twice.

The first time was when it was out in theaters; it made no impression on me at all. It was basically just like any other dour action movie.

The second time really hammered home how subpar its scriptwriting is. The film barely establishes any of its characters in a significant way (especially Banner himself), leaving most of the cast either unlikable or bland (or both). The only character who has anything going on is Blonsky. Other than that it has a dearth of anything to care about at all.

This actually surprised me because my previously most disliked phase 1 film was thor 1, but when I rewatched that my opinion of it improved. I don't think it's a great film or anything, but it was better than I first gave it credit for.

unknowing from somewhere.. Since: Mar, 2014
#93632: Jan 3rd 2019 at 8:24:47 AM

[up][up]Maybe but that barely got play in the movie, Ronan is just fanatical asshole and Drax family was just a blip in the radar.

And about Thor 2, bad part is that Jane look like a romantic protagonist in a superhero movie and Malekith just look he will be better in a Star trek movie.

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#93633: Jan 3rd 2019 at 8:53:02 AM

Amusingly, Drax gets about the same amount of attention paid to his family in Infinity War as was done in Guardians of the Galaxy. "I will recklessly and suicidally attack an overwhelmingly powerful villain to get revenge" is at least a consistent character trait.

Edited by Fighteer on Jan 3rd 2019 at 11:54:18 AM

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Swanpride Since: Jun, 2013
#93634: Jan 3rd 2019 at 8:54:13 AM

Yeah, Thor I grew on me over time, too. Mostly because of Loki and Odin I think. They have the best scenes.

alliterator Since: Jan, 2001
#93635: Jan 3rd 2019 at 9:30:35 AM

To me, Ultron is dangerous not because he's trying to win the fight — he isn't, he knows he can't win a 1-on-1 fight with the Avengers — but because he's a child who wants to wreck the world and, even if he loses, might cause massive casualties in the attempt.

Let's be honest here: nobody expected Ultron to win in Age of Ultron. He was always going to lose. What if he had won in those earlier scenarios? The Avengers would be dead and the movie would be over. So he had to be beaten, but still be around to put forth his plan — which is also what happens with Thanos in Infinity War.

The difference between Ultron and Thanos in Infinity War is that when the Children of Thanos fail — time and again — to defeat the Avengers, we don't ascribe their failure to Thanos himself, even though it is his failure. The Avengers, even separated, managed to defeat all of Thanos's Black Order time and again. The only one they couldn't defeat was Thanos himself at the end (mainly because he had the complete glove).

So if Ultron had minions that were defeated instead of himself, would AOU work better? Or do people just really want to see Ultron defeat the Avengers and have AOU be a two-part movie (which, to me, would make it worse)?

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#93636: Jan 3rd 2019 at 9:38:58 AM

Technically, all of Ultron's bodies are minions. The threat isn't that any one of them can defeat the Avengers, but that the Avengers can never defeat all of them.

Edited by Fighteer on Jan 3rd 2019 at 12:39:33 PM

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#93637: Jan 3rd 2019 at 9:39:32 AM

I always felt Ultron being this really pathetic thing lashing out at everything was exactly what the movie was going for.

It's just that the movie tries to have it both ways, and the end result is a very schizophrenic film that never make up its mind about whether or not it want to be a serious action film or a more wacky action-comedy.

But moving on, with the impending doom of Netflix-Marvel, does anyone else thinks that the whole Defendersverse is now non-canon spin-off?

alliterator Since: Jan, 2001
#93638: Jan 3rd 2019 at 9:40:14 AM

[up][up]See, that's why I don't mind him getting defeated. Because he isn't just one body — he's many bodies. So he doesn't give a crap if one or two or ten of his bodies is destroyed, he's got plenty more.

But moving on, with the impending doom of Netflix-Marvel, does anyone else thinks that the whole Defendersverse is now non-canon spin-off?
God, I hope not. I know they can't use the characters for two years, but then again, they probably already have plans for the next two or three years. But after that, I totally hope they either bring them into the movies or give them new shows (either on Disney+ or Hulu).

Edited by alliterator on Jan 3rd 2019 at 9:42:00 AM

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#93639: Jan 3rd 2019 at 9:48:11 AM

See Ultron isn't gone a threat,you can easily bring him back by saying he uploaded his mind to the internet somewhere so he's never truely beaten,so I'm awaiting Avnegers :Ultron's revenge

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Forenperser Foreign Troper from Germany Since: Mar, 2012
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#93640: Jan 3rd 2019 at 10:07:50 AM

Also, not a threat? In his final vibranium form he had Thor in a choking grip and it took the combined beams of Thor, Iron Man, and Vision to destroy him.

Before that, sure. That fight with Cap was ridiculous.

Edited by Forenperser on Jan 3rd 2019 at 7:07:59 PM

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#93641: Jan 3rd 2019 at 10:10:41 AM

@Alliterator I think your comparison falls apart from the word "go" because the Children of Thanos actually have a pretty solid success/threat rate. Proxima and Glaive manage to wreck and nearly kill Wanda and Vision, having them dead to rights, but are sidestepped by Cap and Widow arriving out of the nowhere and catching them off-guard. They retreat, but their threat factor has been well established by the battle with Wanda and Vision.

Ebony Maw actually succeeds in defeating Doctor Strange and captures him. Supergiant comes dangerously close to killing Stark before Wong doesn't defeat him, but merely teleports him away to sidestep the battle entirely.

They only consistently fail during the final battle, and it's there the point that you can argue "well, if the villain won the movie would be over!". Movies aren't so reductive that you need to have the villain lose every meaningful engagement. That's just surreal, and there are plenty of movies where the hero and villain stand roughly on pair throughout, or that the villain is held off without rendering him totally ineffective.

The success rate of Thanos's Quirky Miniboss Squad already trumps anything Ultron put in the table and they are definitely beaten by the climax. If you removed Thanos from the film, they'd have been a plausible threat for the Avengers.

If you ask me, taking the concept Ultron's a unstable infant constantly evolving, I'd have placed Ultron himself front and center. He starts off as relying on numbers pretty easily beaten and with every engagement he learns and adapts, becoming stronger and less numerous, until the climax where he's fighting all of the Avengers by himself and putting up a excellent (if outmatched) fight.

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#93642: Jan 3rd 2019 at 10:13:34 AM

Another example of how Age of Ultron makes its villains weak: if Quicksilver used a gun at the start of the film, half the Avengers would be dead.

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#93643: Jan 3rd 2019 at 10:20:46 AM

To me, Ultron is dangerous not because he's trying to win the fight — he isn't, he knows he can't win a 1-on-1 fight with the Avengers — but because he's a child who wants to wreck the world and, even if he loses, might cause massive casualties in the attempt.

Let's be honest here: nobody expected Ultron to win in Age of Ultron. He was always going to lose. What if he had won in those earlier scenarios? The Avengers would be dead and the movie would be over. So he had to be beaten, but still be around to put forth his plan — which is also what happens with Thanos in Infinity War.

The difference between Ultron and Thanos in Infinity War is that when the Children of Thanos fail — time and again — to defeat the Avengers, we don't ascribe their failure to Thanos himself, even though it is his failure. The Avengers, even separated, managed to defeat all of Thanos's Black Order time and again. The only one they couldn't defeat was Thanos himself at the end (mainly because he had the complete glove).

So if Ultron had minions that were defeated instead of himself, would AOU work better? Or do people just really want to see Ultron defeat the Avengers and have AOU be a two-part movie (which, to me, would make it worse)?

Nobody ever really expects the villain to actually win by the end credits. Part of suspension of disbelief is convincing your audience that the villain's success is a legitimate possibility - indeed, a likely probability. Tension is driven by the fear in the moment that the heroes will not succeed, even though we logically know that they obviously will.

Failure to generate this suspension of disbelief through the creation of a menacing enough villain, however, will greatly undermine your story. The Black Order being defeated is fine because Infinity War's menace is driven by Thanos, and we are shown right off the bat how scary Thanos is when he brutalizes the Hulk with his bare hands.

If that fight had ended in the Hulk easily curbstomping Thanos and then Thanos grabbed the Tesseract and fled for his life, Infinity War would have been a far lesser film. Ultron, indeed, starts the film as a pathetic wimp who could never hope to beat the Avengers, and so there's no real sense of tension or intimidation from him in the scenes where we're meant to fear and be intimidated by him.

Technically, all of Ultron's bodies are minions. The threat isn't that any one of them can defeat the Avengers, but that the Avengers can never defeat all of them.

Which is a solid enough angle, but we're never really shown that either, though. The only time the Avengers actually fight more than one Ultron, it's the climax and they stomp their way through the Ultron drones just as easily as they did the Chitauri horde.

Vibranium body or no, swarm of drones or no, there's never a point from beginning of the film to the end where Ultron actually seems like he could win a fight with the Avengers. And that makes it difficult to buy into the action, when it feels less like an epic battle against a supreme foe and more like pest control.

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#93644: Jan 3rd 2019 at 10:28:26 AM

It's unfortunate because Ultron's introduction (him "crashing" the party in a delapidated iron man robot) is actually a great scene that makes him feel quite scary. The problem is that from that point onwards it doesn't really stick.

unknowing from somewhere.. Since: Mar, 2014
#93645: Jan 3rd 2019 at 10:33:49 AM

"In his final vibranium form he had Thor in a choking grip and it took the combined beams of Thor, Iron Man, and Vision to destroy him."

And both moment are undermine by a joke: first with the "I dont know what to said" and then "In retrospective".

Loki getting a tantrum and threating the Hulk was silly but he got a pretty good rep by wrecking the Helicarrier so is not so bad, Ultron have to share is moment with the twins and he never got anything on is own.

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#93646: Jan 3rd 2019 at 10:45:20 AM

Loki never really feels physically threatening, but he also never really has to. There's no point where it feels like he could win a straight punch-up with the Avengers, but he's not here to. He acts as vanguard to Chitauri invasion. As noted, the Helicarrier is his show of force, and it's not one of physical force; the scepter influences the Avengers into destroying themselves while Loki walks free.

And even then, Loki does defeat Thor while all this is going on. Baits him into the Hulk-smashing cage and drops him towards Earth in a precarious situation. And then he kills Coulson. All in all, Loki comes off as super menacing despite never feeling like he could personally take any of the Avengers in a 1v1 deathmatch.

The Battle of New York itself, while visually similar to the Battle of Sokovia, also feels more menacing due to the Sky Portal (which would become a cliche in later films, but was put to great effect here). The Avengers start out carrying the day but the Chitauri just keeps coming. The tension isn't that the Chitauri will drop some super-warrior that will beat the Avengers, but that their seemingly endless numbers will ultimately win from attrition.

That works because we see the Avengers growing exhausted and weary from the fighting. They're taking hits. They're breathing heavier and heavier. Hawkeye runs out of arrows. The point is made onscreen, both visually and verbally, that if they can't shut down the portal then they will lose this thing.

The Battle of Sokovia replaces that with the countdown clock attached to the meteor. But they find a way to destroy the meteor like halfway through the fight, and after that it's just delaying the inevitable. Ultron lost before the big final battle around the detonator even started, and at that point they were just trying to see how many people they could rescue before finishing the job.

Age of Ultron came out in the aftermath of Man of Steel, and you could feel the backlash when their climax revolved almost entirely around rescuing civilians from the battle zone. But they went too far the other direction, to the point where it felt like they had the time to do this because the villain and his evil plan were just so easy to manage.

Edited by TobiasDrake on Jan 3rd 2019 at 11:45:33 AM

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#93647: Jan 3rd 2019 at 10:45:33 AM

"In retrospect" happened WAY later, at the very end of the battle, after Ultron had basically already lost. That's after Ultron shoots Quicksilver and when Hulk jumps into the Avengers-Plane. The only thing after that for Ultron is Scarlet Witch ripping his core out and Vision finishing him off.

unknowing from somewhere.. Since: Mar, 2014
#93648: Jan 3rd 2019 at 11:04:00 AM

[up][up]Is intersting because you can feel how Loki did nothing in battle of New york other that get surprised by Haweye, being smart talk by Tony and then stomp by Hulk, clearly by that moment is villan creed just wear off and he just stay there, but it did the job before so it dosent matter.

The battle of Sokovia have three issues: how to stop the detonator, how to rescute everyone and how to defeat Ultron: the first is given halfway on the battle and Tony does on is own so it dosent matter, so when the question start about "how they are going to save all those people" the answer is....a shinny helicarrier coming from god-knows-where, you can see is backlash but is telling the movie need to create a external element to save the avenger of that issue.

And of course when the helicarrier show up, Ultron threat just short vanish.

Edited by unknowing on Jan 3rd 2019 at 3:08:38 PM

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unknowing from somewhere.. Since: Mar, 2014
#93649: Jan 3rd 2019 at 11:05:18 AM

Damn it, double post

Edited by unknowing on Jan 3rd 2019 at 3:06:17 PM

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MrSeyker Since: Apr, 2011
#93650: Jan 3rd 2019 at 11:06:35 AM

My own two cents in this whole Ultron nonsense, who I found sufficiently interesting and threatening, is that a good chunk of the battle is all about being goddamn heroes and helping as much people as rhey can while stopping the bad guy.

Weak moments of pacing and questionable lines aside, the whole confrontation on Sokovia is an amazing and triumphant moment for the Avengers.


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