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.
Edited by Mrph1 on Jul 29th 2024 at 3:09:00 PM
Also, if there’s a movie that you really aren’t interested in seeing, you can always find a plot summary somewhere. I’ve seen maybe half of them and I know there are things I’m missing, but I still have some idea of what happened in the ones I didn’t see. Also helps that I’ve seen more of the recent ones than not.
One of the best things about some of the MCU series is that the later ones pretty perfectly prevent you from needing .
Captain America, in particular: each of the later moves sums up without excess exposition the important things you need to know from the preceding one.
Ant-Man, too. You don't need to have seen the first Ant-Man to follow Ant-Man and the Wasp (though you do, amusingly, need to have seen Civil War).
Edited by KnownUnknown on Apr 27th 2019 at 1:59:23 AM
Maybe I'd argue that Infinity War and Endgame are the only MCU instalments that suffer continuity lock out. All the others find the time to establish was the prior status quo was. Civil War and The Winter Soldier both find an excuse to show us a flash back of Howard Stark and Bucky for seemibgly main character exploration, before they make surprise apparences later in the same films.
Honestly for as much shit as it rightfully gets, Age of Ultron is easily one of the most important movies, continuity-wise.
This song needs more love.Not the weakest in the MCU (lol Malekith), but definitely very close to the bottom.
Plus a lot of how it was written didn't really evolve between "team up movie" to "the team is stable, and the characters are growing and facing new threats." Ultimately it's not a great look for most of the characters.
Cap and Tony come out alright, though. And despite the movie's best efforts to ruin it, Banner's arc is ultimately pretty decent.
Edited by KnownUnknown on Apr 27th 2019 at 3:08:15 AM
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For me the moment that really sunk the movie is everything about Vision's creation.
Everything about it is infuriatingly bad screenwriting. The whole plot is caused by Tony (in part thanks to Wanda messing with him, but still) making a horrible mistake due to his own hubris and thinking he knows better than everyone else.
The correct follow-up to that from a narrative standpoint is for Tony to either recognize his mistake and work towards becoming a better team player, or he fails to learn and he is punished for his lack of growth.
Instead, he just repeats the same mistake and he gets rewarded for it because the narrative they want demands it. It's grossly unsatisfying and just destroys his whole character arc in the movie, whatever it may have been.
I don't think any of them are to be honest.
Quill did a good job all things considered, but I get the feeling Gamora would have been a better leader myself, and I'm not clear on why she didn't?
Then again, he was the one who kinda galvanized them towards saving Xandar. I guess she's not leadership material either so much as she tends to keep Quill centred.
Thor...has said many times he's not a leader (it's why he initially turned down the crown, and it's why he made Valkyrie the leader of new Asgard). I get the feeling that stuff at the end was more him fucking with Quill than anything else (which is alright with me).
So for better or worse, Star-Lord will remain leader of the Guardians (and hell, he led them to save the universe twice so that's not really a bad thing).
Edit: ....shit. I fucked up.
Sorry. I just responded on instinct.
Edited by HandsomeRob on Apr 27th 2019 at 6:48:41 AM
One Strip! One Strip!![]()
Thanos is obviously the most powerful, both personally and in terms of the forces he has behind him.
Hela is probably the next-most-powerful, given that destroying Asgard was the only way to beat her.
Ultron is also fairly powerful. Ronan is powerful in terms of the forces he has behind him; individually and without the Power Stone, not so much.
Villains with a lower power level include all the Iron Man villains, all the Captain America villains individually (though HYDRA as a otganization with SHIELD’s resources was powerful). Loki isn’t especially powerful on his own; the Chitauri were beaten by six people, so it’s not so much that they’re a major power as that Earth was unprepared for the possibility of an alien invasion. Killmonger and Zemo are among the lowest-power villains, just being a skilled special-forces operatives.
My takeaway from this is that a villain being powerful has nothing to do with them being interesting. Powerful villains can be flat, cliché and boring, and low-power villains can be clever, complex, and have nuanced motivations.
This goes back to my previously-stated views that there are 4 main types of threat a villain can pose: physical (strong), intellectual (smart), emotional (has a personal connection to the hero) and ideological (challenges the hero’s worldview) - and that the first type tend to be the least interesting in superhero stories.
Edited by Galadriel on Apr 27th 2019 at 9:07:57 AM
He probably squishes everyone.
Oh yeah, that dude is just waiting to come back and have another bargaining session with Strange, if you guys get my drift.
One Strip! One Strip!

Age of Ultron has a lot of things that are, if not necessary, really add to understanding Infinity War — the Vision, Tony's dream, and so on.
Edited by alliterator on Apr 27th 2019 at 12:56:51 PM