I spent the last several days watching all the Marvel movies leading up to and including Avengers: Infinity War for no other reason than I’m a big ole dumb. I’m now going to list my hot takes vaguely in the order in which I watched them just so I can pretend to have something to show for it.
- Iron Man holds up as a generally good movie.
- An interesting through line in all the movies that Iron Man shows up in is that he gets diegetic music and it’s always AC/DC.
- Iron Man, being a series ostensibly about Tony waking up to the terribleness of the military industrial complex, has just a shitload of military worship in it and generally suffers from the fact that Tony uses all the money that could literally end global poverty to build rocket powered fists to punch people.
- Iron Man 2 is very 2010.
- Somehow Iron Man 2 is more dated than Iron Man and Iron Man had a Myspace reference in it.
- The Incredible Hulk is bad and boring and somehow even the stuff with the Hulk is boring and I don’t know how they managed that.
- Thor is pretty okay but the type of “pretty okay” which means it’s better than just “okay” but you still don’t want to call it “good.”
- They teased Hawk Eye in Thor but he didn’t even get to do anything bad ass so we all just have to take the movie’s word for it that he’s bad ass.
- Captain America: The First Avenger slaps.
- I’m even pretty lukewarm on Captain America as a character but he’s had the most consistently good movies of all the characters that’s had multiple movies. All of them are bangers.
- The Avengers is a good movie by itself but it’s hard to argue that Joss Whedon’s bathos (I learned a new word for you people) hasn’t overly influenced all the movies that came after.
- I hate to be all Cinema Sins about it but Iron Man 3 has one or two pretty glaring plot holes. Also, it’s pretty skippable considering every subsequent movie undermines any/all of Tony’s growth arc.
- Thor: The Dark World exists solely to establish on plot point in the overarching narrative and upon remembering I had to watch this movie is the closest I came to giving up on this endeavor.
- Guardians of the Galaxy, on the other hand, is a delight and is as good as the first Captain America.
- Guardians of the Galaxy: Vol. 2 has my favorite opening sequence of the Marvel movies but isn’t quite as good as the first.
- That elevator scene in Winter Soldier.
- They couldn’t decide if Captain America and Black Widow were platonic or not.
- Ultron is better if you imagine him as Robert California.
- I know you can pick apart inaccuracies all day but if Ant-Man had to shrink down small enough to fit through the space between molecules to get through the metal plate then hOW IS HE BIG ENOUGH TO MESS WITH THE WIRES AND STUFF UNDERNEATH?!
- Otherwise, yeah. Funny, good film.
- Civil War, Homecoming, Black Panther, all good.
- Doctor Strange: so very boring. Just, incredibly boring. Like, the literal definition of “incredible.” I am incredulous as to how they made that movie so boring. Tied with Hulk for most boring.
- Thor: Ragnarok: Thor learns that he doesn’t need a big weapon to save the day.
- Avengers: Infinity War: Thor gets a big weapon to save the day.
- The supercut of the parts of all the Marvel movies where one character is stalling the villain so another character can suddenly hit them very hard or whatever could be its own feature length film.
- They probably won’t have time for this but I want a love triangle between Valkyrie who’s into Hulk and Black Widow who’s into Bruce Banner.
- Men are too emotional to be Star Lords.
- I remember seeing Infinity War in theaters and when the credits rolled someone in the theater yelled out “What the fuck?!” in the most honest and pure expression of that sentiment that I have ever heard.