It’s amazing what can come along and burst your hype bubble; sometimes, it’s saying how a product won’t have NPCs (Fallout 76), sometimes it’s because you are really getting skeptical about the company making it, and sometimes… it’s taking an important member of a Superhero team and locking it to a specific console. After it being leaked yesterday, and then the companies involved just lying to us, it’s been revealed that Spider-man will be console-exclusive DLC in Marvel’s Avengers… on the PS4.
So, full disclosure… I think when you just look at the raw value and quality of titles, the PS4 is the best console of this generation (though the Switch is the best and we all know it… it’s just different). The Xbox had a really rocky launch, but they’ve pivoted what they offer (through updates and the insane value of Game Pass), to have a decent system. For me, though, most importantly… it’s the system that most of my friends have. Including the friends that I was planning to play this game with.
I know, I know… pre-orders. I’d been planning on playing this to cover here. WAS planning…
I can understand why Sony wants an exclusive like this, but it’s become increasingly out-of-step with what consumers want. Cross-play and multiplayer have rendered these out as a negative in the mind of a lot of consumers (and developers), where having a timed exclusive means you have to start sectioning them off. They’ve been screwing things like this up all generation, and repeatedly take anti-consumer moves in how they handle things. It’s disappointing, but not shocking. Sony does the wrong thing until they’re forced to do the right one.
What is more shocking, here, is seeing Marvel and Square|Enix go down this path. The PS4 is the number one selling console of this generation, but PC and Xbox are still a pretty massive chunk. Especially in the United States, which will be the main market for the game. They just took one of the most popular characters and told a big chunk of their market “please pay the same price for a worse version of the game.”
I’m sure plenty of people are going to be just fine about that; because gamer’s are often terrible, more than a few are taking the opportunity to make fun of and rip into Xbox and PC players because even though the idea of the console wars is asinine, a lot of people just love them. Thinking past our own selfish needs and wants, though, and it’s hard to see this as anything other than an anti-consumer move. I own a PS4, and could play this on there if I wanted to, but I don’t feel like this is behavior that should be rewarded at this point.
It’s also not a matter of Sony having an sort of exclusive rights; their rights extend to the character in movies. TV is produced and Disney’s own animation studios, and Spidey has been in plenty of other video games (the PS4 game was a single exclusive on the console, and not part of Sony’s contract for the character). I don’t know if Sony was able to hand over enough money that it would offset the sales they will be lost on other platforms because of it.
In one little anti-consumer move, what was my most anticipated game of the next couple of months just became a “yeah, no thanks” or a “maybe later” game for me. I know I’m only one order, but it’s one they’ve lost.
It’s commerical time, because the Super Bowl was last night, and that means that all of the new trailers and things were up. Honestly, I didn’t even watch the game, so mostly I’m relying on YouTube for them. That being said, the preview for Falcon and Winter Soldier, WandaVision, and Loki are short, but wow, it makes me want them. I mean, I have kids, so I wasn’t going to be cancelling Disney+ anyway, but if I had, this would have me considering signing right back up… If for no other reason than Scarlet Witch in her comic traditional costume.
While in recent years, the Marvel Cinematic Universe has leaned a little bit more in to the “well, that’s just goofy” side of the comics, they’ve always kept one foot grounded in a sort of reality. Yes, it’s about people in tights fighting robots with a bow and arrow and it doesn’t make any sense, but it still has just enough there to make you think… yeah, okay, this could happen.
There’s so much to the comics universe that’s just crazy and typically wouldn’t work in a live action show, but could carry it in animation. Sony, ironically, figured this out first with their fantastic Into the Spider-Verse movie, but Marvel has mostly stayed away from setting anything in or near the MCU that didn’t fit the cinematic look. That, seemingly, is changing… maybe (they haven’t actually said if the new show will be in the same universe), with the arrival the animated Marvel’s M.O.D.O.K. series coming to Hulu.
This is exactly what it looks like.
For those who don’t know, MODOK is a giant, intelligent head… the name stands for Mental Organism Designed Only for Killing. That is the least crazy thing about him. He was the leader of A.I.M., a name that should sound familiar, as it was Killian’s company in Iron Man 3. The comics had him all over the place, but let’s look at the plot outline they put on Marvel.com for this show…
[A]fter years of setbacks and failures fighting the Earth’s mightiest heroes, M.O.D.O.K. has run his evil organization A.I.M. into the ground. Ousted as A.I.M.’s leader, while also dealing with his crumbling marriage and family life, the Mental Organism Designed Only for Killing is set to confront his greatest challenge yet: a midlife crisis!
Okay, sign me up, because that is just crazy on all fronts. There’s a lot to unpack with this announcement, the most important of which is that Hulu looks to be the home of the more “adult” content, which gives me hope that there will be tie-ins for the MCU that aren’t bound strictly to Disney+ rules (which has seen a fair amount of things pulled, censored, or changed). We don’t know that it’s in the MCU, but that would just be lovely, and gives creators a lot of freedom to explore the far reaches of the Marvel Universe for story ideas.
The big announcement here is the voice cast looks to be locked in place, and headlined by Patton Oswalt as the voice of the titular character. That’s a huge thing in my book, as Patton is a legit nerd and a fantastic actor and comedian. He already had a turn in the MCU-ish as the Quadruplet Koenig brothers on Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., so it’s nice to see him come back, even if only in voice form. The rest of the cast features comedic actors like Aimee Garcia, Melissa Fumero,Wendi McLendon-Covey, Ben Schwartz, Beck Bennett, Jon Daly and Sam Richardson.
No date yet on when it will hit the streaming service, but hopefully it ends up sometime this year… or at least whenever Disney figures out how to give me a yearly bundle of both Disney+ and Hulu Ad-Free…
Well, the day of Streamageddon has finally come, with Disney+ officially launching to demand everyone’s time – at least if you can get it to work, which few people seemingly can. There is an absolute boatload of content coming to the service, but as of launch day, the only “new” content that’s exclusive to it is a live action Lady and the Tramp (… really), and of course, PCU’s Gutter’s live-action Star Wars show, The Mandalorian.
Early impressions of The Mandalorian have been cautiously optimistic among people I know, so we’ll have to wait and see how it shakes out. Disney isn’t releasing them to binge, instead taking the same approach CBS All-Access took with Star Trek Discovery and doing weekly releases. Honestly, I’m fine with that, since I skip a lot of shows these days simply because I don’t have time to commit to bingeing them all.
Outside of the exclusives, a lot of content is making its streaming debut, or finding a new home. All 30 seasons of the Simpsons are now a Disney+ exclusive, thanks to the Disney-Fox deal. All of the MCU and Star Wars movies are available on the service as well, and will be exclusive to the platform as deals expire with Netflix and Amazon. Same with James Cameron’s Avatar… remember that pretty-but-boring tech demo for 3D? Plenty of other titles will be coming in the near future, but for now, there’s plenty there to occupy your time.
It’s San Diego Comic Con, and that means… well, normally, a lot of news that has nothing to do with comic books. Luckily, Marvel came along and decided they were going to announce (read, confirm poorly kept secrets) some of the next movies coming along for the MCU.
We have a list of upcoming stuff. It’s an interesting list, with both TV and movie projects, as well as some obvious gaps that we know exist in the pipeline (Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, Spider-man 3, Black Panther 2, Captain Marvel 2… which have all been announced as being in development). We’ve known about the Disney+ stuff like Falcon and Winter Soldier, Wanda+Vision, Loki, and What If? for awhile… but we get the ultimate murder-hobo show in Hawkeye added to the list.
May 1, 2020 Black Widow
Fall 2020 Falcon and Winter Soldier
November 6, 2020 The Eternals
February 12, 2021 Shang-Chi and the Legend of the 10 Rings
Spring 2021 WandaVision
May 7, 2021 Doctor Strange 2: In The Multiverse of Madness
Spring 2021 Loki
Summer 2021 “What If?” animated series
Fall 2021 Hawkeye
November 5, 2021Â Thor: Love and Thunder
First up, the Eternals, which is a cosmic property that has been around for a long time and is unknown by… well, pretty much everyone. It was a curious property; they are more or less a straight copy of DC’s New Gods, but both were created by Jack Kirby. He created this team when he returned to Marvel, after DC cancelled his series before it could finish. They had ties to the Celestials, which in the MCU have been shown in the Guardians of the Galaxies movies. The team itself is obscure even by the standards of everything else we’ve gotten, though it will likely be based on the Neil Gaiman reimagining of them back in 2006.
The lineup that was announced at SDCC is pretty interesting: Richard Madden (Game of Thrones) as Ikaris, Angelina Jolie (Hackers) as Thena, Kumail Nanjiani (Silicon Valley) as Kingo, Lauren Ridloff (Walking Dead) as Makkari, Brian Tyree Henry (Atlanta and Spider-man: Into the Spider-verse) as Phastos, Salma Hayek (Fools Rush In) as Ajak, Lia McHugh as Sprite, and Don Lee as Gilgamesh, the Forgotten One.
I have… basically no preconceptions of this movie going into it. It’s an ensemble cast, which Marvel has proven they can do even with obscure and offshoot properties. Chloé Zhao is a very fascinating choice as a director, and it could very well be Marvel setting up a lot of the stuff they just got back with the Fox deal without setting up the standard mega-teams (Fantastic Four and X-Men)… yet. There are a ton of ties between the cosmic characters and those teams.
That wasn’t all we got in the way of official announcements… Simu Liu was announced as the title character for Shang Chi and the Legends of the Ten Rings. We knew the movie was coming for some time, but had very few details about it other than Marvel was trying to cast it like a good martial arts movie, and sidestep the questionable source material it was building on.
The tagline should sound familiar, as it was the terrorist organization that the “Mandarin” used in Iron Man 3 and Iron Monger dealt with in the original Iron Man. We know that it will have the “real” version of the Mandarin as an antagonist, who was revealed to exist in the last One Shot. No word on if Trevor will make a return or not, or how any of these movies deal with the effects of Infinity War and Endgame. As a genre, it is an interesting choice… because it, like Westerns, are fairly rare in the West. Yet, when they’re done right, we get some absolutely amazing films. It’s being directed by Destin Daniel Cretton, who hasn’t really worked on a project like this before (but did direct The Glass Castle, which starred a pre-Captain Marvel Brie Larson and a “wasted on Solo” Woody Harrelson).
The news of a new Doctor Strange is both surprising and not-surprising. There was a very obvious thread set up in the first movie that needs to be addressed, so a sequel was always a given. But it’s also been several years since the character was talked about in a solo capacity. There’s actually a lot that could happen with this, and again, we get a tease of the multiverse. It features the same director as the first one, which is a fine, if not spectacular film, so it is likely a safe bet.
Now let’s talk about the most awesome news of the bunch. It came out that Thor 4 was officially in the works, and Waititi was returning to direct. This is an awesome development, because Thor: Ragnarok was awesome, and his character had the most fascinating arc (which I have many conflicted feelings about) in Infinity War and Endgame. I really softened to my stance on Portman’s Jane Foster after rewatching the movies, and the more recent Mighty Thor is one of my favorite runs of the last decade or so.
So, the fact that we’re getting Portman back to kick all sorts of ass, visiting those stories, getting Valkyrie and Odinson back… and who knows what else (please work the Guardians of the Galaxy into this, PLEASE). I am not counting down to this movie, and it is officially at the top of my excitement list.
There were other teases and announcements mixed in, albeit with no dates tied to them. Blade is coming back, featuring Mahershala Ali as the titular hero. Which… is interesting, given that he has already played a villain in another Marvel property, Netflix’s Luke Cage (and he was amazing in it). Marvel has had a rule about not reusing an actor in a different role in their universe, so this closes the door, and hard, on the Netflix stuff being part of the MCU. Marvel Studios head Kevin Feige also said that there are projects in development that will feature the Fantastic Four and the Mutants they’ve got back in house, though didn’t provide many details. We still don’t know what’s going on with Deadpool, but Disney would have to be out of their mind to not continue on with the movies that basically print money.
So, it looks like the MCU will continue to hum along and dominate the box office, and the new series will continue to justify our Disney+ subscription at the same time. I love that they’re finally putting focus on making the different series work together… something that was always frustrating about the Netflix shows.
I haven’t really posted much on the big Star Trek stuff that’s been going on lately, which I should. Yes, I know, we are a Star Wars site at our roots, but I’ve always had a place for both of the huge franchises. Star Wars has been in a bit of a lull since Solo, failing to do a lot to surprise and thrill much of anyone outside of small groups (a lot of the comics are good, Resistance is not bad… but both are pretty niche).
On the other end of side, Star Trek has been seeing a pretty huge resurgence after years of neglect at the hands of CBS. The launch of Discovery a couple of years ago manages to get tons of people to sign up to CBS All Access for a couple of months to binge them (myself included), but with the announcement of more new series to fill out their service, that suddenly made it seem more worthwhile.
They took the first steps last year before the second season with the launch of Short Treks, which tied into the main show. The second season was certainly stronger with the first as well, and introduced some great versions of old characters in Captain Pike, Spock, and Number One. Seeing that they’re all returning in the next batch of Short Trek is exciting, since they weren’t going to be in the mainline show going forward. And then CBS showed off the Picard trailer…
I’ll admit, I was skeptical of the Picard show when they first announced it. I love Patrick Stewart, I love the character of Picard, but there was so much more to mine in the setting and lore. Yet, as more and more details have come out, and the teasers, it was clear that this had all the potential to be something special. At SDCC today, they dropped the first trailer.
Okay, so much to unpack in this, but let me get this out of the way first: THAT’S SEVEN OF NINE! I, like most Trek fans, have mixed feelings about Voyager (it’s better than most think, and as bad as most remember), but her character was great and Jeri Ryan is a fantastic actress. Seeing her, and that there has been some obvious and clear evolution of the character over the years, absolutely thrills me. This went from some background excitement to full hype train for me, and I will have to pick up CBS All Access the moment it comes out.
And LEGO… Star Trek is hot again, and I don’t think anyone has the license for building toys right now. Just sayin’… we know you’ll do competing licenses and lines, we’ve seen it (like Super Heroes). So maybe it’s time for you to go into this and get all of my money…
It’s a rare thing for a sequel to be greater than the original movie: Wrath of Khan, Godfather II, Empire Strikes Back, Spider-Man 2, The Dark Knight, X2 (despite the dumb naming convention)… you know, a lot of comic book movies come to mind. With the exception of Wrath of Khan, nearly all of these are follow-ups to movies that were well received and successful in theaters. More than that, while the sequels were better, how much better can be debated.
I really liked Captain America: The First Avenger, and it was fairly well received… but the difference between the First Avenger and The Winter Soldier is just immense. We’ve gotten two sequels before this movie (or three if you want to count Iron Man 3) and none of them could live up to the original outside of having better production values. Going in to this movie, there wasn’t any real hint that it was going to be better… but watching the trailer there was a hint that it was going to be different.
Seems like maybe Nintendo should be on the list
Not only does the movie stand above the whole of of the Phase II films, it’s probably the best overall movie that Marvel has ever made. The superhero part of it almost disposable… it’s far more spy thriller and action movie than anything else. The action movie elements of this are at the forefront of this and so much of it is unabashed old-school physical action unlike anything we’ve seen in any of the rest of the MCU movie.
The whole tone of the movie is set in the first scene, and this is probably the fastest we get into the action in any of the Marvel Cinematic Universe movies. Outside of the humorous start and an introduction of a new character, we are right to a spy mission to rescue a ship. The opening fight is very Borne-esque, and it sets a new baseline normal for what Captain America does and what he is capable of doing.
So, shortly after Steve stabbed this guy, he kicked him and the knife wasn’t there
This is a movie that is about tension and mistrust, and it does a fantastic job setting it up and then just ratcheting it up over, and over, and over. The only constant is that man at the center, never once wavers… its a movie that says “don’t trust anyone” but implies a silent “except him” with it. It’s a real shame that Marvel Comics didn’t learn that same lesson before doing the just terrible Secret Empire series back in 2017.
The whole of what you see unfolding is always just out of focus or out of reach. You have no idea what is going on in the ship scene, only that something is off with the mission. Steve gets annoyed at the idea of Project: Insight, but we never get the idea that Fury is skeptical of it as well. Before we get answers, Fury is attacked and we get an amazing scene where there are hundreds of well-armed soldiers looking to assassinate him… culminating with the Winter Soldier showing up sporting a Soviet Star on his arm.
Just think, people born after the Soviet collapsed turn 28 this year.
As the audience, we know that’s Bucky because we know who the actor is… but our characters don’t (and that’s always the best way to reveal a secret). It was great casting when they did it for First Avenger, and I don’t know if they had planned then to move him forward as the Winter Soldier at the time, but it sure looks inspired now.
We don’t even get a whiff of the “big bad” in this episode until Steve and Widow show up in New Jersey and Zola reveals that Hydra is the big boogeyman behind everything. At that point, everything snaps into place and you see the whole plot come together… and the danger just increases. We know the plan, we know the stakes, and it’s all about just getting it blown apart.
This is such a nice little touch for the comic fans
The level and depth of the Hydra infiltration is the one thing that does sort of make me raise an eyebrow… we last saw them as this unstoppable technical force behind the Red Skull, and they are simply everywhere. How did they do this without tipping anyone off until that point? I get the subtlety of what they were trying to do, but the recruitment of that many people should have raised a lot more questions in an agency that’s all about intelligence. Or, it could just be that I’m sad Jasper was Hydra and has shuffled off this mortal coil.
That being said… Robert Redford is simply fantastic in this movie as a villain who had played the hero but is also the villain. What makes him so sinister, so ruthless, is that you know he is a true believer, but worse than that… he thinks he is in the right for it. That’s what makes Hydra so much more terrifying in this movie than they were in The First Avenger. It’s not just a bunch of Nazi’s running around with their twisted ideas… it’s those twisted ideals made more subtle and insidious.
Stabbing right into the feels. Seriously, that moment where you realize what’s wrong with her is simply heartbreaking. Such amazing acting from both of them in that little moment.
That it runs so deep, that it compromises SHIELD itself… it’s a fantastic twist that sets up the rise of the Avengers as a force and so much more. The movie brought about huge changes to the whole of the MCU. It wasn’t just future movies that were changed and set up by it, but the whole of their television universe as well. This movie marked the point where Agents of SHIELD went from being an okay show to being an amazing one. There is a moment at the end of their first season (which involves Fury and Coulson) where you just want to tear up at what is said.
The introduction of Anthony Mackie as Falcon is where we get another supporting Avenger in, and he is just perfect in the role. The mixture of snarkiness and irreverence that fits the character and plays off the straight-man of Rogers so well. Both Black Widow and Falcon serve a similar role in this movie, and it does just enough as a counter to break up what is a serious action movie otherwise.
Hail Hydra
The relationship between Falcon and Captain America in the comics is so important (he was the man that Steve trusted to take up the shield in the comics, so I love seeing it here. The connection between them is established quickly, and there’s a lot of shorthand done as brothers in arms, but the actors make it believable. Unlike some of the other movies we’ve had lately, they give him quite a bit of time as a full supporting actor in the movie and doesn’t just use him as an excuse to move around the main characters.
Even though Captain America is in the title, Black Widow and Nick Fury as just as much the main character as Cap is in this. The relationship and charisma between Natasha and Steve in this movie is just… incredible. Her sarcasm in the face of absurd danger carries over from what we saw in the Avengers, and her constant needling and poking at Steve is both endearing and funny.
The visuals from Lawnmower Man really hold up.
I suppose you could look at the Winter Soldier as the villain of the movie, given that he’s in the title… but he’s honestly more of a weapon, and a victim, of Hydra than anything else. Every time you see him on screen, you know that something isn’t quite right… he doesn’t talk until the fight where Hydra is trying to kill Steve, and even then it’s a short “who’s Bucky.” Not until later on, when you see Hydra destroying his brain yet again, that he does more and takes a far more tragic place in the story.
It’s the action of the movie that stands at the forefront, being both over-the-top and fare more… I guess practical, than what we’ve had in the past few movies. I mean, don’t get me wrong… it’s ridiculous and insane a lot of the time. The Russo Brothers desperately need a firearms consultant to tell them how many rounds a gun can hold (seriously, those SCARs and M-16s that we see Hydra using hold 20-30 rounds, tops, in the clips shown, and would be empty in under three seconds). But it’s just so good.
Originally this was supposed to be Hawkeye flying the Quinjet, and he was going to let Cap go… but they felt there were enough characters in the movie already
Even when it gets particularly silly, like when Cap jumps twelve stories and lands on his shield, gets up, and takes off, you sort of accept it because it is Cap and we’ve seen him do a ton of crazy things. It doesn’t matter if both his legs were broken and he had the “please form a line” sign through his chest, he’s going to get up again because he can do it all day.
The action just keeps coming, and coming, and coming in the movie… but what it manages to do is show us a great story at the same time. The rise of Hydra, the fall of SHIELD, the spy thriller of everything around it… all that unfolds as we walk through the movie and it being there doesn’t undermined the action, and the action feels as important to the story being told.
Fun fact: no building in Washington DC has more than 15 floors, so the building is actually the most unrealistic thing here. Oh, and all of this fighting is happening above Washington DC…
Even the end fight… which has been a historical weakness for MCU movies not called The Avengers, works in The Winter Soldier where it didn’t in the First Avenger. You know that Steve is going to stop the Helicarriers, and that he’s going to survive it… but the wreckage of SHIELD is all around and there is something tragic about the last battle happening between Bucky and Steve.
One thing that I don’t get… it has been implied that SHIELD is a secretive and clandestine organization that operates in the background to keep the world safe. In this movie, they are front and center, in a large building, and building massive helicarriers that would cost hundreds of billions of dollars to set up and launch. Did… did no one notice that they hollowed out such a massive complex under the Potomac to fit three of these beasts, along with hundreds of quinjets and a literal army of heavily armed troops?
As good as the hallway scenes were in Daredevil, they’ve got nothing at all on the Elevator fight in this movie
Seemingly everything that SHIELD does is just wildly illegal in the United States and no one seemed to care until they made a mess of it in public. At the end, the US defense department and Congressional committee didn’t seem to care that they crashed a bunch of stuff into the middle of the city and wasted all that money, they only cared that the intelligence apparatus, which was heavily compromised, was gone. Maybe the government or the world security council was the real villains in the movie.
By the end, the stage has been reset for everything that comes next. Age of Ultron is only two movies away, and the next one we get will have nothing to do with it, so this is really the only setup. There was also no McGuffin that the heroes were chasing, the movie basically just introduces Falcon and removes a whole lot else. Fury is underground and “dead” (why did he burn his storage unit, anyway… seems like a waste). Maria Hill is at Stark Enterprises, Agent 13 aka Sharon Carter aka great niece of Peggy is with the CIA, and our heroes are in the wind.
Shouldn’t this be purple?
The two end credit scenes did a bit to set everything for Age of Ultron and whatever comes next for the Winter Soldier (obviously Civil War, but at the time we didn’t know that). We set up villains in Baron Strucker, who is one of the cornerstones of Captain America comics and a major Avengers antagonist. More importantly, though, we get the introduction of two other minor characters in Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch, only called “the twins” in the moment.
We also see that Hydra is in control of Loki’s scepter, something which I have many, many, questions about. I mean… the Avengers had it at the end of the movie, right? They used it to disarm the shield and would have had it. Did they give it to SHIELD, because I don’t see that, given that the Avengers gave the Tesseract to Thor and Loki to take to Asgard. No one knew it was an Infinity Stone at the time, but they knew it was powerful.
I’m certain that these guys will be crucial to the ongoing MCU and won’t be killed in lame ways within the first five minutes of their next movie
This is probably the least comic book movie, that is still a comic book movie, ever made, and that’s one of the things that makes it great. You don’t need to have watched any move before it to still enjoy it as an action movie, and you don’t need to have watched the first Captain America (though you should) to understand the connection between Bucky and Steve in the movie. It does both spy and action movies well, with enough of both to keep everyone entertained.
There is an argument that can be made calling this the best movie of the MCU, and it certainly is the best made up to this point in my eyes… including the Avengers. While that movie is what brought everything together, this is the movie that proved the movies could rise above the comic roots into something else. It’s as good now as when I saw it the first time, and a very solid five out of five.
He wasn’t ever fired from Marvel, actually… he just sort of stopped showing up for work in the 1990s and they kept paying him
Review Summary
Since there are going to be a lot of these reviews, and it’s nice to see how all of the movies stack up against one another, we’re going to add a little summary section for the Marvel Cinematic movies. When we’re all done, I’ll have an article that goes over my rankings of all the movies (which won’t necessarily reflect the overall quality of the movie in stars, etc, more of how it ranks within the total collection).
Iron Man 3 is probably the most infuriating of the Marvel Cinematic Movies to watch as a fan of the comics, a fan of the movies, and someone who is effectively a critic (albeit an amateur critic). It gives us the second* biggest enemy Tony Stark across his publication history in the Mandarin. It has a fascinating take on the effects of being a superhero and the trauma and PTSD that would absolutely be a part of it. Robert Downey Jr. is probably at his best in showing us the hot mess of a person Tony Stark has become in the movie, and it works incredibly well.
At the same time, so much of the movie just ends up not working. While I personally like a lot about the Mandarin reveal, I totally understand why it sat wrong with a lot of people. There are also a lot of parts that undermine the pacing and direction of the story that it is a bit harder to watch than the other movies we’ve watch.
You have to give them credit… it takes some real talent to miss on the source material this hard.
Iron Man 3 also gave us some of the absolute worst licensed sets that LEGO has ever made. I know that LEGO doesn’t have full access to the movie and a lot of the production, but they get concept art, early clips, and feedback from the production. I’ve yet to see the concept art in Iron Man 3 where the Mandarin, wearing a muscle shirt, was chasing after Iron Man and War Machine in a riding lawnmower.
All of that aside, though… the biggest problem I usually have with Iron Man 3 is that so much of the action is so far over the top as to be… dull. Nearly all of the end fight is Michael Bay-levels of ridiculousness, and that takes what had been an uneven but entertaining movie and turns it into a trainwreck (or maybe a ship crash). Both of the “big” action scenes in the movie suffer from this problem; the attack on Tony’s house and the battle in the shipyard kind of look cool but get so eye-rolling if you brain gets a chance to think about it that you will have trouble to be getting back in.
These are comic book movies, so we’re going to get a whole lot of silly, physics-defying action… but come on…
I mean, think about the start of the attack on Tony’s house. It begins with a missile exploding between Tony and Pepper and it knocks them backwards by a shockwave that is powerful enough to destroy part of the house but basically just knocks the two fleshy bags of mostly water to the ground. They should have been stains, at best, but they get back up and run away.
Was it cool to see the Mark 42 armor fly around and save Pepper? Absolutely. But just about everything else in the scene was wrong. We see later that all of the armors can fly around autonomously… why weren’t they doing that to defend the house? How do those helicopters even fly with enough weapons to take on the Army get all the way inland like that without alerting what has to be every bit of security in California? The Mk 42 wasn’t ready for battle but apparently it wasn’t ready for anything as he simply stumbled around the entire house as it exploded.
So many people flat-out ignore Tony when he is desperately trying to get help in this movie, but it’s Rhodey ignoring PTSD, which he should be able to recognize, that sits really badly with me.
Almost all of the action is filled with stuff like that. The only action scene that isn’t like that, and really works, is the one where he doesn’t have the armor on and is going full Rambo/MacGuyver and invading the Mandarin compound. There we got to see what makes Tony Stark so good at what he does, and clearly is more than just the guy inside the armor. Side note… how did he pay for all of that stuff?
The strange thing about the core of the movie, the stuff that Tony is dealing with after the Battle of New York, had all of the potential to be fascinating. Tony dealing with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, and he most certainly was based on what we saw, would be a great story to go with. He is, despite protests in The Avengers, a soldier, and dealing with a lot of heavy damage that would take a toll on anyone.
I’ve probably watched this movie a dozen times, and this is the first time that I’ve ever noticed what he wrote on it.
That he is playing out the same patterns we see in soldiers (as well as victims of harassment and abuse… PTSD is not limited to combat and not to physical actions) and denying it, desperately trying to find any other reason behind it, could be a great thread to pull on… if they ever would have bothered. We see him suffering and suffering, and then a statement from a kid with a useful garage he ran into helped him work through it, and that was it. We get so much of it at the start, from the Jingle Bells-inspired building for multiple days without sleep to subliminal messages left in fan art, there’s so much meat on the bone they just throw away.
Sure, the end credits scene sort of played into that, but as a joke, and it should have been treated with a lot more seriousness than it ends up being handled with. In fact, the whole of the narration through the movie leads up to that. At the start of the movie in 1999, it all works, because you’re seeing old Tony causing problems for new Tony. But that is always conflicting with ways that new Tony dealing with his own problems, and the movie can’t seem to make up its mind on which thing to focus on. That being said, Happy’s Mullet and Tony being a huge jerk at least establishes something for the villain to be obsessive about with Iron Man in this.
Don’t get me wrong, the bonus scene was funny, it was the movie that irked me.
Of course, our villains of the movie, Killian (played incredibly by Guy Pierce) and the Mandarin (played so very well by Ben Kingsley), are in a vacuum; just fantastic. A whole lot of comic book fans focus in on the Mandarin reveal in this movie as the biggest problem, but I’ve always loved it. Despite all the problems I talk about in here, that part just works for me.
The reason I think it works is that it managed to thread a very fine needle with the Mandarin, who is one of the most fascinating, and problematic, villains in Marvel history. Created in the 1960s, he was one big bucket of racist stereotypes of the period. He was a Karate master that basically fell into all of the “Fu Manchu” or “yellow peril” caricature that was part of comics for the decades around World War II and through the cold war, so it was going to be a fine line to walk. Iron Man 3 was one of the first MCU movies made specifically so it would play well overseas, in China specifically, so it was going to be a tough line for them to walk.
A lot of the humor works really well, even if it’s presented in such absurd and fantastic ways
There was certainly a lot of noise when it was announced that Ben Kingsley, a British man of Indian descent, was playing the character, it was initially seen as “more of the same” from Hollywood – who has a very bad record with things like this, specifically. That’s what made the reveal that it was all fake, and Killian was the force behind it… both playing directly on American fears to get it done while also falling into a trap of appropriation with his own persona, was quite simply a stroke of genius. Marvel managed to sidestep the problems behind the character with how it unfolded.
Most importantly, if you are familiar with the master manipulator and work-from-the shadows character which the Mandarin finally became in the comics… it was simply a perfect move. It was exactly the kind of thing that the Mandarin would do in the comics, which is why I will always think it worked. It’s not often that a comic movie genuinely shocks me, but I still remember being blown away by Iron Man 3 and how they managed to hide that so well.
Little turtle, cooking in his turtle shell… that line was genuinely menacing
Killian, on the other hand, had so much potential that was wasted in the movie, despite a great job by the actor. He had a real menace to him, and I loved that they were bringing in another stalwart organization of the Marvel Universe in A.I.M. Unfortunately, both are effectively destroyed in this movie, beginning a fairly long streak of Marvel having to always kill the bad guys in their films.
Killian was an interesting choice… he was in the comics and was involved in making Extremis along with Maya Hansen. That being said… he was also an extremely minor character who killed himself in the issue over guilt at selling the Extremis virus. I don’t mind that Iron Man 3 made him so much more, and tied him to A.I.M., I just wish they would have done something more lasting with it.
My favorite part was that he drank Budweiser, and I cannot explain why
The whole of his plan seemed to be kind of bonkers. Using the Mandarin to cover up accidents in developing the glow juice was brilliant, and using that at the same time to effect a shift in power to control the presidency was a Mandarin-worthy move. But… what we he going to do with Extremis when he figured it out?
The side effects weren’t just that people could explode, it also seemed to make people ultra-violent and kind of insane while they could melt metal and apparently breathe fire. It seems like the exploding part was only one of the issues at hand. Unlike previous Iron Man villains, I got the motivations they were setting up, but like the action, it only works if you don’t think about them for too long.
Drink in that super mullet. DRINK… IT… IN…
Part of the problem was the introduction of Maya Hansen into the mix, and just the confusion of it. Rebecca Hall did fine in the role, but it was the character herself that didn’t make sense. Was she trying to kidnap Pepper to get Tony’s involvement, or just trying to find sympathy for the work when the attack happened? Was she in on the whole “Master” thing, or did she believe it (in fact, did anyone in A.I.M.’s employ actually believe it or did they all know)?
She was the one behind the whole of it, but basically all she did was move some characters around and get shot in the end so we knew that Killian was the really bad guy in everything. It was a character that they just wasted, and the only real impact she had on the story is that she is the one who made the glowy goo to begin with. To her point, though, right before Killian shot her… how did he expect to move on with the project without her? He had to know Tony was never going to help, and had been working on it for over a decade at that point.
Hey look, it’s civilian helicopters that are carrying more ordinance than an AC-130 gunship. Joking aside, that was a pretty awesome way to take down one of them.
It’s the middle of the movie, when Tony ends up in Tennessee, where it drags. Adding the kid, who inexplicably has a garage full of everything that he needs thanks to his paper route (I mean, who has papers and since when do kids still deliver them), I guess? The villains happened to be there with the female Extremis soldier who moved exceptionally strange when she went full glowy, to pick up a file the exact day that Tony Stark showed up there? It was all just… convenient.
As an actor, the kid wasn’t bad, it just felt like most of the scenes around there were just wasting our time to fill in things. Yes, it’s nice that he helped Tony get through an attack, but none of it was especially memorable. The best thing about the whole section is the interaction between Tony and his biggest fan, which I have to assume is actually RDJ’s living nightmare put on film.
This was the best set of the mix, but it was so small as to just be underwhelming.
As bad as the pacing slow down is in the second act, it ends strong with that infiltration of the compound and bringing Tony and Rhodey back together. Their work was the best part of Iron Man 2, and the charisma between the actors is far better here than in their restaurant scene at the beginning. Sadly… that’s the last time the movie will really deliver on the promise, because it’s just going to get silly after they work to go after the President and find Killian.
I mean… the initial foray into Air Force One wasn’t bad, though the security on what is the most secure plane in the world is kind of laughable to advance the plot here (seriously, even Iron Patriot would get ID’d to get on it). The initial kidnapping and stuff isn’t bad… but I have about how the Extremis guys work because we see a guy with glowy hot hands that somehow don’t melt right through the floor go toe-to-toe with armor we’ve seen withstand far worse. What is the level where they can regenerate and where they can’t, because that seems to be super unclear.
This is by far the worst cameo that Stan Lee ever did.
That’s the problem with the Extremis soldiers as baddies in the movie… it’s never really defined what they can do, they’re just insane soldiers that seem to have whatever skills they need in the moment. Sometimes it’s heat that can somehow melt titanium composites, other times it’s being able to jump twenty or thirty feet into the airs, others, being immune to bullets. Basically they were just generic action monsters introduced for the final fight.
I should go listen to the commentary track to see who it was that went to an air show and decided that the thing Iron Man 3 was really missing was a ridiculous skydiving rescue number. I mean… nothing about that whole sequence makes sense, and it goes on for several minutes. How are they even conscious given the height they’d need to be at to have time to get together, how can they hear him give instructions, since when can his armor electrify someone, and how is it that being in a circle and having enough force applied to your arms to rip them off would save them?
Blink and you’ll miss it, but this guy was actually fine, and shows up in the credits shaking Trevor’s hand after the fact. So I guess Roxxon was in on it?
The actual production behind the shot it a lot more interesting… it was a real skydive stunt done by the Red Bull Skydiving team (they were digitally removed and replaced with the actors and stuntmen/stuntwomen who did the slowdown on wires at the end). They actually did several jumps a day for several straight days, from 14,000 feet, to get everything they needed. The most fun aspect was that they were wearing the clothes you see in the scene over their chutes and packs. The most painful aspect was that they had to do each jump without goggles, which would be like staring into a windstorm… for a week.
I mean, on one hand, it was a fun scene, but it didn’t add anything. Iron Man killed the bad guy in the plane, and we got to see him be a hero saving everyone. We already knew he was a hero, so this was basically filler… maybe as a sly intermission opportunity, I guess. It was really just setting up a chance to get the Iron Man armor smashed so he and Rhodey had to go after Killian by themselves, which could have easily been done by saying it was out of power. After the tight and efficient editing of Captain America: The First Avenger and The Avengers, this movie is just… wasteful… with the time and scenes it had.
It’s easier to count of what’s right in this set than to list off what’s wrong with it. #1 It includes Iron Man. #2 …
Of course, for all the problems I had with the attack on his house, the fight at the end was ten times more (and worse). Most of the fight that is interesting, between Tony and Killian, relies on changing the rules of the world as we knew it. We’d seen the time it takes for Tony to put on the Iron Man armor in every instance where he’d worn it… but here, he was in and out of multiple armors in under a second.
Like I mentioned above, we saw the Extremis soldiers just making up new powers, and nearly all of the fight is between various Iron Man armors that should have been turned into a Collectable Minifigure Line and nameless bad guy grunts. There are explosions, insane moves frome people with no armor and power, and some good comedy moments between Tony and Pepper that are undone by a temporary fridging of Pepper to motivate Tony.
Much like IM2, the big problem with Pepper in this is how often she is hostile or just ignores Tony, including once when he is pouring out his heart to her and explaining the problem.
I actually like that she’s the one who ultimately “took care” of Killian, but there’s also the fact that so many people in this universe can seemingly kill another person without batting an eye. I mean, the Extremis seems to cause a whole ton of aggression, but in the other cases, he was recruiting soldiers and people trained to fight as grunts… where did Pepper learn any of that stuff?
Of course, the characterization of Pepper hasn’t gotten much better in this movie compared to Iron Man 2, and we get an equally inconsistent take on the character. I don’t think it’s Paltrow, who does a fine job in the part… more in how she’s presented. She’s still CEO of Stark Enterprise (I think), and she’s doing great, but also she sees the trauma and pain in Tony and mostly ignores or dismisses it. Much like Maya, once it’s time to just move people for the final fight, she’s moved aside and we barely see her until it’s time for the final fight.
We deserved a bigger play set of the various Iron Man armors on display. And no, I don’t think that the new Endgame set is it, at least based on the pictures.
This is the last time she’s going to have much past a minor supporting role in the MCU (she appears at the end of Spider-Man: Homecoming and at the start of Infinity War, but that’s it), and I wish she would have had a better showing. While Gwenyth Paltrow may bug me all sorts of ways with her woo nonsense, the character of Pepper Potts was great and she did bring a lot to the role. There was a lot of promise on places it could go (Rescuse, for example), and it didn’t really happen.
This movie was a real step back from the upward swing that we’d gotten with the past two. It’s not… terrible, per se, but it has more problems than the other Iron Man films. It’s just strange that they are different problems than we got in the last sequel. More than that, though, it really doesn’t do much to set up anything in the future. By the time that Age of Ultron comes around, Tony is back in New York and building. The only thing really looking forward here is in the end credits scene… that Bruce Banner is working with Tony Stark.
Gutter does wake up in the end, so I guess all’s well that ends well.
Other than that, none of the villains or characters have any influence in the future of the MCU. Much like the Incredible Hulk, you can cut this movie out of a marathon and not miss a lot… though it’s a better overall movie with a lot more going for it, so you’d be missing some fun stuff (just not that much fun action). For that reason, I’m going to call it a three out of five, basically average. It hurts in some ways, succeeds in others, and basically cancels out into the middle. Luckily, the next movie is a Thor movie, a film they had so much confidence in that they didn’t even set it up with a stinger scene. It can’t possibly be worse can it.
I mean… can it?
*The biggest enemy Tony Stark, in the comics or the movies, will always be Tony Stark.
Bonus Review: Agent Carter
I love the spycraft stuff that she does as part of the mission
For all the inconsistently of Iron Man 3, it’s Bluray/DVD release did give us the best One Shot that Marvel ever made in Agent Carter. It’s also the first ones that is part of the bonus features on streaming services if you buy the movie (the other three you have to crack out the discs to see). It’s a revisit of the best female character they’d had in the universe thus far, and was a setup to her woefully underrated TV show (come on, Disney+, bring back Agent Carter for season 3).
After stabbing us directly in the feels with a replay of the most emotional scene in the MCU, we get a fascinating blend of Carter dealing with the realities and sexist nature of 1940s/1950s America, which was a very real thing in the post-war era (one that didn’t go away, it just changed) as men were coming home from battle and women pushed out of roles they’d filled. Seeing what we knew was a complete badass character reduced to clerical work kind of hurt, and you were just waiting for her to prove herself.
20 gallons of jackass in 5 gallon bags…
Luckily, through her boss being horrible, she gets just that, and what follows is far better action than we got in the movie. It’s a mixture of her being awesome and smart at the same time, more or less effortlessly disarming a gang to get a deadly weapon back. We get to see her be smart, get an insane grouping shot, and show the kind of planning that would make for a great TV show that, seriously, we all want back Disney.
Review Summary
Since there are going to be a lot of these reviews, and it’s nice to see how all of the movies stack up against one another, we’re going to add a little summary section for the Marvel Cinematic movies. When we’re all done, I’ll have an article that goes over my rankings of all the movies (which won’t necessarily reflect the overall quality of the movie in stars, etc, more of how it ranks within the total collection).
Disney launching a streaming service, the creatively named Disney+ (better than Disney 2.0, I guess), has been a reality for awhile now. There’s been plenty of wailing and gnashing of teeth over “yet another streaming service” showing up, but this is the end outcome of the request for “ala carte” service that people wanted cable TV to become. Streaming is what everyone asked for when they asked “I just want to pay for the channels I watch.”
Disney has been pretty tight-lipped about what it would entail and focused more on who would be losing out in the deal (Netflix, for the most part) and who would be gaining (anyone who hates the “Disney Vault”). We had promises of exclusive content on the service and knew that was the major driver behind the 20th Century Fox acquisition, but not a whole lot else until Thursday when the company pulled back the curtain on everyone’s future streaming service.
Disney+ will launch in the US on November 12th of this year (Europe and Asia will be sometime next year), and it’s going to run a startlingly-low price of $6.99 a month, or $69 for a full year. Given that price will include new Marvel Cinematic Universe and Star Wars shows exclusive to the platform, the entire Disney and Pixar animated movie catalog, every Disney Channel Show, the Simpsons (Disney+ is the new exclusive streaming platform for the show), and whatever else they have planned… that seems like one hell of a deal.
It seems like the idea Disney is going with initially is market penetration, and they are pricing Disney+ not as a competitor to Netflix, Amazon Prime, or Hulu… but a complement to it. This seems more in line with pricing like Xbox Live, PlayStation Plus, or four Nintendo Switch online subscriptions, and gives a lot more value than any of those things do. Disney is also giving the impression that they’re going to release bundles for some of their other properties as well, such as ESPN+ or Hulu (which they’re now the majority owner of), to add more value for likely more money.
What will make or break it, ultimately, is platform access. Netflix was initially successful by being available everywhere and on everything. Thus far, we’ve only gotten word of Roku and PlayStation 4, but other platforms are in the works. The reality is, for any streaming service, that to be successful you have to be as many places as possible (it remains to be seen if Apple realizes that, but Disney most certainly does and has had other Disney streaming apps for some time), so I’d expect it on consoles and mobile before launch.
Given that there are Marvel shows coming for Falcon and War Machine, the Winter Soldier, Vision and Scarlet Witch, Hawkeye, and a lot of the other secondary characters, I’ll end up with a sub for that alone. On the Star Wars front, the Mandalorian will be available when the service launches in November as well, so expect move coverage as we get closer.
Until then… prep your wallets for a lighter-than-expected hit.
At 12:02 AM, EST, on March 20th… the deal is finally done, and the House of Mouse now owns all the good parts of Fox (while leaving the bad part like News, and really expensive things like sports, under a stand-alone company). One curious thing… the Fox network now doesn’t own the vast majority of what they are airing.
Obviously, the promise here for most of us has been the return of two of the oldest, most important, and most famous Marvel properties: X-Men and the Fantastic Four. Along with them… the huge majority of characters come back for use by Marvel. While I don’t expect to see either of those properties suddenly take over the MCU, I fully expect characters and other things start to sprinkle back in. After all… Wolverine is just as famous as an Avenger as an X-Man in the comics (if not more so… he was literally in everything). As it sits, the lone holdouts are Spidey and related stuff (still licensed by Sony), Hulk by himself (Universal), and the “first mutant” Namor, the Marvel version of Aquaman (also Universal for some reason). Oh, and for whatever reason, Lionsgate owns the rights for Man-thing…
That means that the upcoming X-men: Dark Phoenix and New Mutants will be the last we will see of the X-men for some time and have nothing to do with the MCU. Sadly, it also means that the future development of things like Deadpool or TV shows like Legion or The Gifted are more uncertain. We’ll mostly have to wait and see.
With the Disney streaming service on the horizon, they now have a back catalog of basically 2/3rds of things people love, either owning them fully or having exclusive rights to them: popular shows like the Simpsons and Family Guy, more adult fare like Archer and Always Sunny, and a whole ton of movies… like Alien, Predator, and the various vs. between them.
In short, Disney now owns basically everything… and we just need to learn how much Disney+ is going to cost us (or is it going to roll into Hulu, which they also own the majority of now).
