Marvel Media (Spoiler Thread)

Rat Boy wrote:

Watch as everyone tries to play 1 Degree of Kevin Bacon to find out who he wasn't worked with yet.

This episode was called "Breaking the Fourth Wall".

IMAGE(https://www.giantfreakinrobot.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/deadpool-1-900x572.jpg)

(I suspect it's somebody more related to Wanda)

Rat Boy wrote:

Watch as everyone tries to play 1 Degree of Kevin Bacon to find out who he wasn't worked with yet.

Oh man, I hope it is Kevin Bacon.

Mixolyde wrote:
Rat Boy wrote:

Watch as everyone tries to play 1 Degree of Kevin Bacon to find out who he wasn't worked with yet.

Oh man, I hope it is Kevin Bacon.

IMAGE(http://www.escaparatedemascotas.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Quicksilver-.jpg)

This must be what Kermit felt like every time he lost control of The Muppet Show.

MannishBoy wrote:

Talks about working with somebody on the show that hasn't been revealed yet that he's always wanted to work with.

Paul Bettany just seems like a pure joy in every interview I see him in. I would like to have a couple beers with that guy.

People seem to have settled on Agatha as the big bad for the season, but I'm not convinced.

Comments on AV Club say that killing the dog is a sign she's irredeemable, but I don't think she killed Sparky. That whole thing rang false on every level when it happened.

MrDeVil909 wrote:

People seem to have settled on Agatha as the big bad for the season, but I'm not convinced.

Comments on AV Club say that killing the dog is a sign she's irredeemable, but I don't think she killed Sparky. That whole thing rang false on every level when it happened.

I think she's serving a greater master (aka Ralph) that will either show up at the very end or in a stinger to set up the next movie.

Ralphisto, you say?

hbi2k wrote:

Ralphisto, you say?

IMAGE(https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-BvLfkegUDMo/Vt8BdcjTb0I/AAAAAAAAHDc/wHCC6j2ZJGw/s1600/Happy-days-retro_650x435_zpsd44955b0.jpg)

Ralph Malphisto

MrDeVil909 wrote:

People seem to have settled on Agatha as the big bad for the season, but I'm not convinced.

Comments on AV Club say that killing the dog is a sign she's irredeemable, but I don't think she killed Sparky. That whole thing rang false on every level when it happened.

I'm not 100% convinced that she is either, but she clearly doesn't want Wanda to healthily process Vision's death. She was probably the one throwing up the roadblocks to stall Vision & Darcy too, not Wanda. She's been there from the start though, and that means either she was there when Wanda created the Hex (and possibly did something to cause her to), or she immediately sensed it and breached the barrier herself soon after. Whether she's got a capital-E Evil Plan or she's doing this for more selfish reasons I don't know.

All the people that Vision has freed kept saying "she's doing it" or "she's in my head" but none of them said Wanda. Agatha could be controlling the town for all we know at this point. Yeah Wanda has certainly intervened, using rewind to replay scenes, etc. But we don't know Wanda is controlling anything else for sure.

Dottie got some camera time as Monica and Wanda had their confrontation. Agatha did say in episode 2 that Dottie was in control, and she was the one repeating the "for the children" line . . .

Still voting on Agatha being neither good nor evil, but more of a pragmatist. Part of me wonders if the rumored Big Special Guest at the end is Doctor Strange, and he just sighs and says, "Agatha, when I asked you to look over Wanda, this is not what I meant . . ."

MilkmanDanimal wrote:

Doctor Strange, and he just sighs and says, "Agatha, when I asked you to look over Wanda, this is not what I meant . . ."

Hahahaha

IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/cqGlfxL.jpg)

MilkmanDanimal wrote:

Still voting on Agatha being neither good nor evil, but more of a pragmatist. Part of me wonders if the rumored Big Special Guest at the end is Doctor Strange, and he just sighs and says, "Agatha, when I asked you to look over Wanda, this is not what I meant . . ."

The actor who plays Vision has said in a recent interview that Dr Strange is not the rumoured big special guest.

detroit20 wrote:

As quickly as I consume old content, new content is being created to replace it. I could never catch up. I'd be the hamster on wheel. I'd be the Red Queen. Running as fast as I can merely to stay in place...

I hope I don't come across as too contentious, but you're saying you'd rather miss on content that has already been curated and celebrated for fear of missing out on content that could end up being mediocre?

As part of my WandaVision obsession, I decided to rewatch Age of Ultron last night for the first time in a very long time, as it's in my "at least better than Iron Man 2 and Dark World" rung. More enjoyable than I remembered for dumb fun, but, man, that movie is a mess. It feels like a series of vaguely interconnected scenes where coincidences just plop everybody together for big fights; they hear about Klaw so wind up on the freighter with Ultron and the Maximoffs at the exact same time, with nothing about research, and, at one point, Banner sees a picture of a butterfly, and immediately thinks they need to go to Hong Kong where Cho's lab is. There's nothing whatsoever in terms of showing anything beyond random guesses that drop you onto the planet in the perfect spot; it reminds me of Moonraker in that way, in that it's just a series of scenes where the heroes just happen stumble into the right spot.

Also, I'd always thought of Ultron as one of the worst villains, but he's being upgraded to the absolutely worst villain in the entire MCU, which says something. I remembered him being a whiny, petulant teenager, but his characterization is all over the map; he learns everything from the internet, but, the first time he meets the Maximoffs, he can't recall what the term for "children" is. He's just awful.

After my rewatch, I've now moved Age of Ultron into my "at least better than Iron Man 2 and Dark World" tier, so, you know, still absolutely the same.

The ending with Vision and Ultron redeems it/him:
"They won't last."
"Something beautiful rarely ever does."

Hobbes2099 wrote:
detroit20 wrote:

As quickly as I consume old content, new content is being created to replace it. I could never catch up. I'd be the hamster on wheel. I'd be the Red Queen. Running as fast as I can merely to stay in place...

I hope I don't come across as too contentious, but you're saying you'd rather miss on content that has already been curated and celebrated for fear of missing out on content that could end up being mediocre?

There's something to be said for being part of the conversation, and there tend to be more opportunities for that when the content is still new.

There are exceptions: Netflix getting Neon Genesis Evangelion about a year back meant that a lot of folks were revisiting it or discovering it around the same time, so I took the opportunity to give it another shot after bouncing off of it back in the day. I probably got a lot more out of it by virtue of experiencing it at the same time as a lot of other newcomers who I could compare reactions with.

mudbunny wrote:
MilkmanDanimal wrote:

Still voting on Agatha being neither good nor evil, but more of a pragmatist. Part of me wonders if the rumored Big Special Guest at the end is Doctor Strange, and he just sighs and says, "Agatha, when I asked you to look over Wanda, this is not what I meant . . ."

The actor who plays Vision has said in a recent interview that Dr Strange is not the rumoured big special guest.

That's a shame. But that means the special guest is Thanos, right? Right?

Iron Man 2 is still our Black Widow introduction. It's pretty great for that alone.

And War Machine.

I did a whole MCU rewatch back in July. Can't remember if I posted here or in D+ thread but I had some Thor 2 thoughts as well.

My girlfriend and I are doing the whole rewatch thing right now. She had a hard time even remembering Pietro, so we decided to go back to the beginning. I always thought that Iron Man 2, Captain America 1, and Ant Man were all bottom-tier. I have since moved Captain America 1 up to the pretty good tier, Iron Man 2 is the worst so far, and Captain Marvel has been moved to bottom-tier.

We're watching in timeline order and just watched Guardians 1 last night. So, Guardians 2 and Age of Ultron are up next.

My top 3 remain unchanged. Winter Soldier, Guardians 1, Avengers.

My bottom 3 has changed to Iron Man 2, Captain Marvel, Thor 2.

I always kind of liked Thor 2, but upon rewatching I was just bored.

Oh, IM 2 had some great stuff. Sam Rockwell is phenomenal in that movie, it's just that, as a whole, it's kind of blah. Dark World has some genuinely funny stuff and Loki's great, but it all feels pointless. Everything in the MCU has been at least reasonably high quality and loads of fun, it's just that the baseline has been set pretty high, and there are some movies that just didn't quite reach up.

I've been listening to the Binge Mode podcast series covering the MCU and they bring up a good point on Thor2. Despite it's issues, it starts or is involved in some many later threads to the Infinity Saga.

My top 2 are Winter Soldier and Ragnarok. After that it's mostly to close to rate other than various tiers. I do need to give Marvel another watch. I really liked it the first time.

What's funny is I had it above Shazam at first, but I think Shazam has jumped ahead a bit.

Iron Man 2 works pretty good as an episode in a weirdly structured, super expensive TV show. Since I was very late to the party, this is how I've always watched the majority of these films, and so for me Iron Man 2 will always be a bit above the middle of the pack.

However, stepping outside my personal experience I can definitely understand why some might have been disappointed by it in the context of being a standalone tentpole blockbuster film. But I also expect that many such folks might also find their opinions of it growing when recontextualized as part of a full rewatch, even if they aren't consciously shifting towards seeing the whole series as though it were a strange version of the modern prestige TV series format.

Hunted up my blog post about Iron Man 2 from Jesus-Christ-it-can't-really-have-been-oh-God-it-actually-was 2010:

Pretentious 2010 hbi2k wrote:

I saw Iron Man 2 the other day, and it's been kind of bugging me ever since. It seems like it should've been just pure silly blow-stuff-up fun, and it hit all the right notes, but somehow it just... wasn't. I think I thought a little too hard about it, and there are things about it that once you see, you can't unsee.

In the first film Tony Stark comes, through a combination of genius and accident, to have control of an overwhelming military force in the form of the Iron Man suit and the arc reactor that powers it. The arc reactor is compared to the atomic bomb; the technology of the suit itself is easily modified into a series of unmanned drones which brought up, in my mind at least, uncomfortable comparisons to the sort of technology currently being employed by the United States in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

As the sequel begins, Tony is attending a legal hearing aimed at forcing him to turn this technology over to the U.S. military on the grounds that America's enemies are aiming to reverse-engineer it to create Iron Men of their own to attack us. Tony refuses, saying that these unsavory types are still twenty years behind his technology and that, through the threat of overwhelming force, he has successfully "privatized" world peace. "You're welcome," he quips to the discomfiture of the Senator presiding over the hearing and to the cheers of the general public.

There's a problem with Tony's glib solution to national security beyond the obvious fact that it's based on an oversimplification of complex issues: Tony is dying from overexposure to the fictional element that powers the suit. The security of the free world relies on his remaining decades ahead of the competition, but he doesn't have decades. Tony stumbles drunkenly (sometimes figuratively, often literally) through the film, desperately searching for someone to whom he can entrust his legacy.

Can he hand over his military and technological power to the U.S. government? No. They are incompetent and hopelessly entangled with special interests, and when they do get a hold of an Iron Man suit due to Tony's trust in the one competent, honest soldier in the movie (played by a brow-furrowed Don Cheadle), its security is almost immediately compromised. Can he put his trust in the private sector, in the form of rival industrialist Justin Hammer? Lord, no. They are even more incompetent, not to mention irredeemably corrupt, providing financial backing to the film's obligatory mad scientist villain.

When Tony hands the keys of his company to obligatory love interest Pepper Potts, it seems less an act of trust than one of resignation, a total abdication of responsibility. In fact, even disregarding his illness, Tony himself is an entirely untrustworthy steward of the immense technological and military power he possesses, getting drunk and using it to perform tricks for party guests.

By the end of the film, of course, the villain is defeated, Tony's fatal illness is cured, and the status quo is restored. But the status quo is so unstable and utterly untenable to begin with that it left me with little comfort. The government is still incompetent. The forces of capitalism are still corrupt. Tony is still irresponsible. And the enemies of freedom are still working feverishly to catch up to the technological superiority that is all that keeps them in check.

To read all of the above, you might think that Iron Man 2 was a thoughtful and darkly conflicted analysis of the United States' position in world affairs. Nothing could be further from the truth. The film raises these issues seemingly by accident, and then seems almost embarrassed at the deeply disturbing questions it asks and the total lack of answers it offers to them. In a profoundly nihilistic fashion, its only response to any of this is to make something else blow up good or to show another group of sexy ladies literally dancing across the screen. We're all f*cked anyway, it seems to say, helpless victims of forces far beyond our ability to influence, so we might as well enjoy the fireworks as everything is blown to hell, might as well listen to the band play on as the Titanic sinks around us.

In nearly every scene, whether it's the legal hearing or an F1 race or the Stark Expo which reminds one of the conferences in which Apple announces its next new gadget, Tony always has an audience. And the audience always cheers. Or screams. And all too often, it's impossible to tell the difference.

Four way tie between Ragnarok, Captain Marvel, Black Panther and Winter Soldier for me

I’m not seeing enough The Incredible Hulk in these worst lists.

Mantid wrote:

I’m not seeing enough The Incredible Hulk in these worst lists. :P

I genuinely forget it exists, and I'm guessing most people don't consider it part of the MCU, regardless of what Marvel says.

I'd put Winter Soldier at the top of my list, closely followed by GotG 1, Ragnarok, Endgame, Avengers, and Homecoming. Or, if I can include WandaVision, that's up at the top as well.