kevin feige

Agents of S.W.A.M.P.F.L.I.X.: Iron Man 3 (2013)

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Superhero Watching: Alternating Marvel Perspectives, Fresh and Longterm, Ignoring X-Men, or S.W.A.M.P.F.L.I.X., is a feature in which Boomer (who reads superhero comics & is well versed in the MCU) & Brandon (who reads alternative comics & had, at the start of this project, seen less than 25% of the MCU’s output) revisit the films that make up the Marvel Cinematic Universe from the perspective of someone who knows what they’re talking about & someone who doesn’t have the slightest clue.

Boomer: In 2014, director Jon Favreau released the indie critical darling Chef, in which he appeared as a man who tired of the world of elite haute cuisine that values style over substance, a man who forsakes that world to fix up an old food truck and take a more “back to basics” approach to food. As has been pointed out by other critics, this can be seen as a metaphor for Favreau’s fatigue with the Iron Man franchise, as he bowed out of directing the third film, although he reprised his role as Hogan (if spending 80% of the film comatose can be considered a reprisal). Instead, the reins were handed over to Shane Black, whose resume as a writer includes Lethal Weapon, Monster Squad, and The Long Kiss Goodnight, and as such was already well-regarded before he began directing with 2005’s Kiss Kiss Bang Bang.

In 2007, British TV producer Drew Pearce created the cult hit No Heroics, a sitcom focusing on the downtime of troubled British superheroes, and the series aired in late 2008. The surprise cult following of the show led to some interest in an American adaptation during the shaky post-Heroes years in which many stations were looking to ride the superhero wave to the top. An American No Heroics pilot was shot, but ABC ultimately passed on the project (although they greenlit No Ordinary Family, a show that should have gotten a hard pass, just a few years later). Still, this had been enough to bring him to the attention of stateside production companies, and Pearce was initially hired to write the film adaptation of Marvel series Runaways. Although that film’s production stalled out, he was invited to co-write IM3 with Black. The resulting story took large chunks from Warren Ellis’s work on the popular “Extremis” arc from the Iron Man comics (homage is paid in the film by naming the president, played by William Sadler, after Ellis).

Robert Downey, Jr., Gwyneth Paltrow, Don Cheadle, and Paul Bettany(‘s voice) reprise their roles from previous films, and the post-credits gag features a cameo from Mark Ruffalo as Dr. Bruce Banner. New faces include Ben Kingsley as Mandarin, Guy Pearce as Aldrich Killian, and Rebecca Hall as Maya Hansen. As the lead-in to what Marvel Studios called “Phase Two,” IM3 follows up on the events of The Avengers, showing a Tony Stark who is traumatized and living with the aftereffects of the Battle of New York. And, since Shane Black is involved, the film is set at Christmastime for no real reason.

Brandon, what did you think?

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twohalfstar

Brandon: Because I had heard that director Shane Black had taken over Jon Favreau’s directoral duties for the third Iron Man installment, I had gotten my hopes up that it might be the turning point where I started liking the Iron Man franchise at large. Black’s darkly comic work on properties like Lethal Weapon, The Last Action Hero, and The Monster Squad seemed to position him as a perfect fit for taking the Iron Man films into a new, more purposeful direction. I can recognize flashes of that newfound sense of purpose straining to break through this feature’s bogged down mess of a narrative, but ultimately Iron Man 3 felt like just as much of a mixed bag as Iron Man 2.

The film opens with America’s Favorite D-Bag Tony Stark tooting his own horn to Eiffel 65’s “I’m Blue” & referring to the absolute worst era in popular culture (the late 90s, *shudder*) as “the [good] old days” (which, appropriately enough, is when his bad boy schtick & awful facial hair might’ve actually felt fresh). Things get worse from there. The film’s completely-besides-the-point Christmastime setting allows Stark to move on from his previous soundtrack of AC/DC dad jams to dance club remixes of Yuletide carols, which is, musically speaking, my worst nightmare. Tony’s snarkiness has also gotten worse, since the success of the character had apparently lead Feige & company to believe that what the world wanted more of was exchanges like [from a pretty lady] “Where are we going?” “To town on each other,” [to a lady on fire] “I’ve dated hotter chicks than you,” and [to a boy who’s been abandoned by his father] “Guys leave. No need to be a pussy about it.” There are other ways in which the Iron Man franchise has improved in a general sense, but its billionaire playboy protagonist might be a bigger piece of shit than ever here and the worst part is it still feels like the movies are asking its audience to celebrate him for it.

The frustrating thing is that there’s so much of Iron Man 3 that does work, especially elsewhere in the cast. I was a little dubious at first about the series’s return to its War on Terror roots, but Don Cheadle’s transition from toeing the water as The War Machine to full-blown superhero status as The Iron Patriot was encouraging to see. Ben Kingsely’s villain, who I’m pretty sure he was told was supposed to be named Osama Bin Nixon instead of The Mandarin, also has some entertaining moments in the film. I particularly enjoyed the following monologue that accompanied one of his terrorist-funded propaganda films: “True story about fortune cookies – They look Chinese. They sound Chinese. But they’re actually an American invention, which is why they’re hollow, full of lies, and leave a bad taste in the mouth.” The MVP for me, though, believe it or not, was Gwyneth Paltrow as the surprisingly endearing Pepper Potts. I don’t have any particularly strong opinions about Paltrow as an actress, but get the sense that her performances in these films aren’t especially popular among diehard MCU fans, which is a shame. Iron Man 3 allows Potts the opportunity to try on one of Stark’s mech suits, which made for a kinda awesome (and on a personal note, oddly sexy) moment when she gets to save the day for a change. Better yet is her climactic freakout moment, which releases a feral side to Paltrow’s screen presence I didn’t know she had in her (although it was teased in her line-reading of “Are you out of your mind?!” in Iron Man 2).

Speaking of the suit-sharing, Iron Man 3 features more Iron Man suits than ever, which, when combined with remote-controlled automation, makes for some absolutely killer action sequences involving an Iron Man army, some ludicrously complicated suit-hopping/exploding choreography, and a sublimely corny, parachuteless freefall rescue that played nicely into the film’s comic book origins. It’s a shame that none of these charming moments or character beats ever amount to a satisfying whole, though. Repeating the exact same mistakes of Iron Man 2, the film splits its time between two villains, a formula that bogs down its plot, only to make a third act decision to follow the least interesting of the pair to the conclusion. Iron Man 3 even takes this mistake a step further and retroactively ruins its most interesting threat, reducing Kingley’s monstrous terrorist from an Osama bin Nixon to a buffoonish Russell Brand archetype. What a waste. And to think, they casually kick him aside in favor of a fire-breathing version of Val Kilmer’s generic Dieter Von Cunth villain from MacGruber. It’s not a good sign when your film’s lead antagonist most closely resembles a character meant to spoof the genre you’re working in.

Once that shift occurs, Iron Man 3 devolves into generic superhero action cinema. The last 40 minutes of the film feel like a total waste, despite the suit-hopping heroics & Pepper Potts silliness mentioned above. Every now & then Iron Man 3 would throw out a fistpump-worthy moment or two (Stark taking out a helicopter by hurling a grand piano comes to mind), but for the most part the film felt like a mess of compromises & disappointments with half-cooked references to A Christmas Carol that went more or less nowhere & an entirely unnecessary performance by series-vet Jon Favreau as The World’s Shittiest Comic Relief. At best, it’s a generic mixed bag of an action film that almost gets its shit together before completely losing track of what makes it special. At worst, it’s a disappointingly low entry to Shane Black’s catalog, whether or not it helped him gain some notoriety for the strange body of work he had quietly put together prior.

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fourstar

Boomer: A lot of people really disliked this movie when it came out, citing the appearance of a kid sidekick character and the purported ruination of The Mandarin. Personally, however, I have to say that this is probably my favorite of the Iron Man flicks. I’ll admit that the kid sidekick character doesn’t really bother me in the slightest (and he appears onscreen for such a short period of time that his presence is virtually negligible). As for the way that the film used The Mandarin… I actually think that it was a bit of an ingenious move. I understand that this is a character into whom a lot of people have invested time and emotional energy, and I can understand the outrage because I felt much the same way when Star Trek Into Darkness sprang a whitewashed terrible Khan on the audience. The difference, however, is that the fact that Benedict Cumberbatch’s character is Khan contributes nothing to the film other than a familiar name, whereas the Mandarin reveal in Iron Man 3 actually serves to further the plot in an interesting way, and the film does well to play that reveal close to the chest up to the point where we finally meet Trevor Slattery. This was a neat twist that played on expectations of comic book fans and mainstream filmgoers alike, and I think a lot of people were simply caught off guard by the revelation and overreacted to it.

As for other issues viewers took with the film, I don’t really lend a lot of credence to what could be called the Avengers Problem, or, more loosely, the Shared Universe Problem. For some, once a shared universe is established or canonized, there is a need to ask why such-and-such character doesn’t appear in so-and-so’s film. I don’t really understand this impulse on the part of the audience to criticize this element of a work; it’s not as if every character spends all of their downtime together, nor is it a far-fetched idea that a person like Tony Stark who is accustomed to self-reliance would, in a period of self-doubt, try to fix all of his problems without calling on his superfriends. It’s not a problem for me that Banner shows up after the fact and only for a chat, and I feel that a lot of people were looking for elements of the film to complain about, as the honeymoon patina of the MCU was starting to wear thin. All of this is to say: this is a movie about a man who is pried loose from his moorings and forced to confront both his mortality and his potential for failure, and ends up being the least cliche of the Iron Man movies as a result.

There are problems, of course. The film is smart to focus on Tony and his one-man journey, but Paltrow and Cheadle end up underutilized this time around as a matter of consequence. Although Kingsley’s performance as both Slattery and The Mandarin is fantastic, Hall’s botanist character ends up feeling underdeveloped, and we never get a real feeling for her motivations. Pearce’s motivations are also less than perfectly defined, but he stands out as still being a better villain than either Hammer or Whiplash from Tony’s last solo outing. The deus ex machina elements of Pepper’s superheroics at the end of the film are a little on-the-nose, but it was nice to see her get to have more agency this time around, especially since her appearance early in the film painted her in a less than stellar light.

Still, I liked this one. The film largely restrains its elaborate set-pieces to the film’s back half, instead focusing the first half on character building and establishing the new relationships between all the characters, new and old, and the film benefits greatly from this structure. The humor here isn’t derived solely from trying to elicit envy of the Tony Stark way of life, which is a refreshing change of pace. Furthermore, making Stark more vulnerable provides Downey with additional ways to approach the character, which makes both actor and character come off as more likable than in previous installments. It’s a different approach, and the non-standard format of the film’s narrative sets a good example for the way that this film and the five that followed it would change the tone of the MCU at large.

Lagniappe

Boomer: It’s super weird to me that the MCU has a white president. It’s something that felt strange the first time I saw it; normally, I wouldn’t bring it up, but with recent news that Marvel bigwig Ike Perlmutter donated a hefty chunk of money to the Trump campaign, it does raise some questions. Also, it’s a bummer that we don’t hear about Extremis or see any of the fallout in the films that follow. Pepper’s newfound superherodom doesn’t even get a line of dialogue in Age of Ultron, even though she is mentioned. It’s strange, given the fact that the movie seems to set her up as a new power player–not that we needed another character in Ultron gumming up the works.

Brandon: Here’s where I praise Iron Man 3 for what it gets exactly right. Part of what’s been bugging me about the MCU as a cohesive unit of films is that outside of the Avengers crossovers the individual properties haven’t interacted with each other in any significant way. Iron Man 2 was better than most MCU properties on that front, mostly in the way that it gave outside characters Black Widow & Nick Fury something more significant to do besides popping up for a post-credits cameo. Iron Man 3 finally works the Marvel Universe at large into its core narrative, though, which posits it as the most well-integrated MCU property yet (well, outside The Avengers, which is integration by nature).

In the film, Tony Stark is suffering from PTSD after the “gods, aliens, other dimensions,” and robots caused so much mayhem at the climax of The Avengers. He confesses to Potts, “Nothing’s been the same since New York” and in a nice change of pace his ego is put into check by nightmares & panic attacks that can occasionally become life-threatening, especially once he begins operating mech suits in his sleep. I love this sense of progression. It finally feels like a standalone MCU property is actually, significantly affected by the preceding films outside its realm. I look forward to seeing more of the franchise function this way.

Curiously, although Iron Man 3 is the most well-integrated, non-Avengers MCU film so far, it feels like it brings its narrative to a close by the end credits. Everything feels thoroughly wrapped up, finite, as if Tony STark’s time with the franchise were over. If I didn’t know any better, I’d believe that “I am Iron Man” would be Starks’s final word to tie a neat little ribbon on his entire d-bag story arc. What’s even weirder is that after all this finality & integration, the film reverts back to a meaningless post-credits cameo for Mark Ruffalo’s Bruce Banner. Again, the film is the definition of a mixed bag.

Side note: Did anybody else find it strange that this film found time for references to Joan Rivers, Downton Abbey, and the Home Shopping Network? I don’t know what to make of those nods other than to say they felt bizarre in this context.

Combined S.W.A.M.P.F.L.I.X. Rating for Iron Man 3 (2013)

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three star

-Agents of S.W.A.M.P.F.L.I.X.

Agents of S.W.A.M.P.F.L.I.X.: The Avengers (2012)

/ swampflix / 27 Comments

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Superhero Watching: Alternating Marvel Perspectives, Fresh and Longterm, Ignoring X-Men, or S.W.A.M.P.F.L.I.X., is a feature in which Boomer (who reads superhero comics & is well versed in the MCU) & Brandon (who reads alternative comics & had, at the start of this project, seen less than 25% of the MCU’s output) revisit the films that make up the Marvel Cinematic Universe from the perspective of someone who knows what they’re talking about & someone who doesn’t have the slightest clue.

Boomer: The Avengers was always one of Kevin Feige’s goals. Audacious and ambitious, when Feige started conceptualizing the greater Marvel Cinematic Universe his intention was to create a crossover film that united characters originally featured in individual films, mirroring the character/team dichotomy that permeates superhero comics. As such, a great deal of the history of the Avengers film project is really the history of the MCU up to this point, which has been discussed in our previous posts.

Casting for the film began in 2010, with Jeremy Renner’s Hawkeye being cast far enough in advance that Kenneth Branagh was able to insert an early cameo from him into Thor in 2011. Marvel’s official story is that they “declined” to have Ed Norton return as Bruce Banner, whereas Norton has claimed that he never intended to return to the role after the 2008 The Hulk flick, as he “wanted more diversity” in his career. His role was recast with Mark Ruffalo. The only other major addition to the ensemble was Cobie Smulders, who was cast in the role of Maria Hill. Hill is well-known to comic book fans as the sometime director of S.H.I.E.L.D., and she was a key player in Marvel’s then-recent Secret Invasion storyline. As a result, her casing fueled fan theory that her casting was an indication that the metamorphic Skrulls would be the primary antagonists in the film, especially when the Chitauri (who essentially stand in for the Skrulls under Marvel’s Ultimate imprint) were announced as well; ultimately, these theories were proven incorrect. Other than the six Avengers themselves, the film also featured the return of Gwyneth Paltrow’s Pepper Potts and Paul Bettany’s Jarvis from the Iron Man flicks and Stellan Skarsgård’s Erik Selvig and Tom Hiddleston’s Loki from Thor. Clark Gregg also reprised his role as Agent Coulson, and Samuel L. Jackson is featured as Director Nick Fury.

Early story work was completed by Zak Penn, who also contributed to the story for the excellent X2 and co-wrote the screenplay for the abysmal X3; the script was rewritten by Joss Whedon when he was brought on board to direct. There’s no need to explain who Whedon is, right? There are probably sea mollusks out there that are sick of hearing about the Cancellation of Firefly like it was an actual battle that was lost. Still, Whedon’s experience as a director as well as a purveyor of superhero yarns (his run on Astonishing X-Men was particularly good, although I didn’t care for his work on Runaways) made him the perfect fit for bringing the Avengers to celluloid life. Composer Alan Silvestri so impressed Marvel Studios with his composition for Captain America that he was brought back to score this film as well.

But enough about the seeds of the franchise. Brandon, what did you think?

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threehalfstar
Brandon: Finally, an MCU film I’ve actually seen before! When I went to the theater to see The Avengers in 2012 I was aware of its individual characters’ basic attributes, but a little lost as to what exactly was happening in the film plot-wise until about halfway into its massive runtime. The funny thing is that now that I’ve watched all five standalone films that have lead up to this crossover effort, I still found myself somewhat lost. The Avengers is the beginning of the MCU’s descent into full-blown Infinity Stone, MacGuffin-chasing nonsense. The film’s opening sequence feels like the ending of a nondescript action film that just happens to include a magic scepter and a “tesseract”. It’s a pretty clever idea to throw the film’s in-the-know audience into just as much of a confused state as those who just happened to wander into the universe for the first time, but the film’s central Infinity Stone caper is not nearly as much of a draw as the thrill of seeing six wildly varied superheroes share top billing in a single feature, so it feels a bit like wasted time. And once the film sets up its stolen tesseract conflict, it then takes way too much time to re-introduce each of the film’s disparate heroes & bring them together as a single unit. I had a lot of fun with going into an IMAX 3D screening of The Avengers completely blind of context in 2012, but returning to the film fully-informed (movie-wise, anyway) dampened my enthusiasm a good deal. It’s still a fun, crowd-pleasing action film, to be sure, but I think the effort required to get to its gang’s-all-here charm rolling reveals itself to be a little more labored on repeat viewings.

That being said, there are at least two scenes in The Avengers that rank among the best moments in superhero cinema of all time. I’m thinking, firstly, of the scene where the pissant god Loki’s evil scepter causes all six Avengers & (released from his post-credits stinger prison) Nick Fury to bicker in a slowly ratcheted moment of bitter discontent. It’s a well-played moment that sets up how a group of inflated superegos would have a near-impossible time working together as a unit. That scene functions as a set-up for the much more obvious centerpiece: the climactic battle with the alien robot army that destroys an entire metropolis. I don’t really have much to say about the film’s concluding action sequence other than it’s a grand spectacle of fist-pumping action that might be one of the single most fun to watch half hour stretches in the history of superheroes on film. I have no doubt that the reason I left the theater so satisfied in 2012 is that the spectacle of that Battle for the Fate of the Universe completely obliterated any concerns about the labor it took to get there. I was probably also less bored with the film’s individual introductions to the characters & the concept of Infinity Stones on that first go-round, since I feel now like I already put in that effort in the 10 hours of media leading up to that point. Still, I’m entirely grateful for the isolated moments of excellence that The Avengers delivers on its own time, not to mention some wonderful character beats for my favorite duo within the franchise so far (Black Widow & Captain America) and a fantastic revision of a character who simply did not work the first time around (The Hulk). I’ll just be more likely to return to those moments as isolated scenes in the future instead of watching the film as a whole, unless it’s as background noise. The Avengers is one of those movies I can see working best as something you can drift in and out of, maybe while channel surfing or housecleaning or something along those lines.

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fivestar

Boomer: It’s been three-and-a-half years (and roughly 7,283 thinkpieces of varying insight and coherence about whether or not Joss Whedon’s body of work is sufficiently feminist or hopelessly static and outdated) since a group of friends and I went to see The Avengers after a long and trying semester. There was some concern that the film would be bloated or an overall mess. While there’s certainly a case to be made that Age of Ultron would realize those concerns three summers later, I find myself drawn in by Whedon’s first MCU outing every time I watch it, despite the number of times that I have seen it. Between the whip-smart dialogue, the extended but imaginative action set-pieces, and the undeniable cool of seeing super-powered characters come together and coalesce into a united, if volatile, front, there’s so much to enjoy about the film that even the most cantankerous of critics found it hard to commit to panning the movie.

The Avengers is a fun ride, and although the Battle of New York—as the final action sequence would come to be called in later MCU media—admittedly experienced a series of diminishing returns, most of the myriad of other high-octane set-pieces were genuinely thrilling and engaging. It was a smart move to start the film with an action sequence that was largely Avenger-free and which instead focused on Fury, Coulson, and Maria Hill before following that up with a series of smaller scenes that reintroduce each of the key players with varying degrees of bombasity. Other checkmarks in the “good idea” column include the decision to have characters express reluctance and hesitance to commit to the idea of a full-on superhero team, and to introduce the seeds of discord early on. As a result, when the temporary falling out occurs at the end of Act Two, it feels properly earned and not as forced as it so easily could have.

As a writer, Whedon has always had a talent for drafting dialogue and characterization that is at once clever, observational, and occasionally devastating. Jeremy Renner isn’t given much to do in this first flick as he spends most of the film under the brainwashed control of Loki’s staff, but the other Avengers work well here. In particular, Tony Stark improves a great deal as a character under the direction of Whedon, as his dialogue, while still pompous, is less obnoxious in all its crackling Buffy-esque witticism than when other writers have put words in his mouth. Chris Hemsworth’s Thor gets in some good lines as well (the reference to the bilgesnipe is a favorite of mine despite its brevity, as it’s totally wacky while remaining oddly conversational), and Evans gets to show more dimensions to Cap, now a man out of time. Evans’s performance is particularly strong, but, for my money, Scarlett Johansson’s Natasha is the MVP here, not that it should be any surprise that Whedon would expand her role significantly from her previous appearance in Iron Man 2.

Throughout the film, Romanoff is surrounded by men who project assumptions onto her: the Russians she is “interrogating” in her first scene see her only as an object of sexual scorn, using derogatory and charged language; Banner initially underestimates her strength and resolve; Loki spits insults at her, concluding that her investment in saving her friend is purely the result of pathetic romantic attachment. In every instance, these assumptions are false, and Black Widow uses these misogynistic and presumptive attitudes against the antagonists at every turn. Despite some well-choreographed ass-kicking in her last appearance, Natasha was still mostly played for the male gaze (potentially an inevitable consequence of appearing in an Iron Man film); here, she’s an extremely competent agent who is so skilled that she doesn’t seem out of place as a team-member alongside supersoldiers and literal gods. And, like Buffy before her, Nat is not an “strong female character” in the sense that she is an emotionless and implacable badass–she gets hurt, experiences doubt, mourns her comrades, and is forced to fight her closest friend. She doesn’t have to be coded as a male character, and it’s just grand.

Overall, The Avengers is an ambitious but well-suited capstone to the first phase of the MCU. It expands a lot from here, as Phase Two would include not only six films but two network television series (it’s not clear where Daredevil and Jessica Jones fit into the “phase” structure, if they fit in at all) over the following three years. It’s big fun that’s mostly (but not wholly) a surface-deep spectacle.

Lagniappe

Boomer: Not only did my friends and I go see this film in costume, but we caught it in 3D as well, as we had with Thor. For those so inclined, I daresay that Chris Evan’s punching bag scene towards the beginning of the film may well justify the extra dollars spent on the post-conversion.

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(image courtesy of user thecaptainrogers of rebloggy)

With regards to the larger MCU, the events of the Battle of New York will come up again and again, especially in regards to how the public and governments will respond to the team. The death of Phil Coulson is cheapened by the knowledge that his character returned a mere three months later when Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. debuted; the reason for his sudden and unexpected resurrection was one of the ongoing mysteries of that show’s lukewarm first season (arguably the weakest). My original theory at the time was that his mind would be used to create the personality imprint for Vision when that character eventually appeared in the MCU, standing in for Wonder Man, although the MCU obviously went in a different direction.

Brandon: The feeling I got while watching The Avengers‘ 2015 followup, Age of Ultron, was that the MCU was stretching itself a little thin trying to include both barely-interested newcomers & deeply invested comic book supernerds in the same audience. Now that the novelty of meeting the MCU’s characters for the first time in the first Avengers film has worn off a bit for me, I feel that strained divide might’ve begun as soon as 2012. As a compromise between pleasing both the well-informed and the completely contextless, The Avengers is a massively impressive balancing act. However, I think that these crossover films might be better served as standalone works of art if they left newcomers behind completely & just focused on serving the audience who’ve already put in the effort to get there. And I’m saying that as a recent convert who’s just barely keeping up as is.

Combined S.W.A.M.P.F.L.I.X. Rating for The Avengers (2012)

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fourstar

-Agents of S.W.A.M.P.F.L.I.X.

Agents of S.W.A.M.P.F.L.I.X.: Captain America – The First Avenger (2011)

/ swampflix / 18 Comments

EPSON MFP image

Superhero Watching: Alternating Marvel Perspectives, Fresh and Longterm, Ignoring X-Men, or S.W.A.M.P.F.L.I.X., is a feature in which Boomer (who reads superhero comics & is well versed in the MCU) & Brandon (who reads alternative comics & has thus far seen less than 25% of the MCU’s output) revisit the films that make up the Marvel Cinematic Universe from the perspective of someone who knows what they’re talking about & someone who doesn’t have the slightest clue.

Boomer: For me, the key difference between DC and Marvel as companies is that Marvel has always been better at creating characters that are down-­to-­earth and grounded, while DC’s characters are traditionally larger than life and iconic in their titanic stature. Spider-­Man and the X­-Men are relatable characters; Superman and Wonder Woman are inspirational ones. This isn’t absolutely true across the board, and when discussing characters that have existed for nearly a century under the pen of dozens (if not hundreds) of different writers over the decades, there are bound to be many counter-arguments to this admittedly reductive distinction. However, dissecting the different companies’ primary characteristics and output, that difference is the major division between the two. In this sense, Captain America, with his concrete­-if­-antiquated moral code, larger-­than­-life prestige, and well defined ethical concepts, is the Marvel character most like a DC hero, and this, combined with the built-­in fandom that comes from such an outspokenly and inherently patriotic character, has made Cap an enduringly captivating dramatis persona. Despite being only one of many, many jingoistic characters introduced in the build up to (and following) WWII, Captain America continues to be a fan favorite, and it’s no surprise that Marvel has gone to his well many times in their creation of non­-graphic media.

Following his introduction in March 1941 (nine months before the US officially became involved in the war), Cap made his way to the silver screen in under three years, with a film serial being filmed in six weeks in October and November 1943 that started screening in February of the following year. This serial bore little resemblance to the comics character, which film historians attribute to the likelihood that the original script was written to feature Fawcett Comics character Mr. Scarlet; as a result, there is no super soldier serum, no shield, and no mention of Nazis, and Cap’s secret identity is not Steve Rogers but civilian District Attorney Grant Gardner. This would be Marvel’s only theatrical release until 1986’s Howard the Duck. Two made-­for­-TV films, Captain America and Captain America II: Death Too Soon, were released in 1979 and starred Reb Brown; these featured a contemporary former­-marine­-turned­-artist who acquiesces to undergo testing of a “super-­steroid” following an accident and then fighting crime using the costume that he envisioned for the character he created as a visual artist. A Captain America feature, inspired by the financial success of Tim Burton’s Batman in 1989, was filmed and intended for theatrical release in 1990, but the completed film was such a disaster that it was quietly dumped into the VHS market with little fanfare.

After three attempts at a film adaptation, mostly unsuccessful, a new vehicle for Captain America was envisioned. Screenwriters Leslie Bohem (Daylight, Dante’s Peak) and Larry Wilson (The Addams Family) were initially approached in 1997, but the project was put on hold due to a legal dispute between Joe Simon (co-­creator of Captain America alongside Jack Kirby) and Marvel regarding rights and royalties. This suit was settled in 2003, and the film was batted around for a couple of years, with Avi Arad optimistically announcing in 2006 that he hoped to see the film released in 2008. These plans were again put on hold due to the 2007-­2008 WGA Strike, and plans were finalized in late 2008 following the release of Iron Man, with a planned release date in May 2011 (eventually pushed back to July) under the working title The First Avenger: Captain America (with the two parts of the title being swapped later in production). Joe Johnston, well known for his effects work on Raiders of the Lost Ark and his direction of Honey, I Shrunk the Kids and The Rocketeer, was tapped to helm the picture, and Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, the screenwriting duo behind the Chronicles of Narnia films, wrote the script.

The film follows scrawny Brooklyn artist Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) who, desperate to participate in the fight against the Axis, becomes a test subject in an experiment to create super soldiers, an experiment based on the studies of German expatriate Dr. Abraham Erskine (Stanley Tucci). Howard Stark (Dominic Cooper) also participates in the experiment under the supervision of Colonel Phillips (Tommy Lee Jones) and British liaison Agent Peggy Carter (Hayley Atwell). The experiment is a success, but an on­site attack means that the project cannot be recreated. Meanwhile in Europe, the Red Skull (Hugo Weaving) and his super-science organization, Hydra, have broken away from Nazi oversight in order to pursue his own interests, assisted by Dr. Arnim Zola (Toby Jones). Rogers is immediately enlisted as a figurehead for the war effort, but when he goes behind enemy lines to rescue his childhood friend Bucky (Sebastian Stan), he becomes a real hero. I already have an idea as to how Brandon feels about this film, but, without further ado, here’s his opinion:

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fivestar

­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­Brandon: I’m in that weird little pocket of movie nerds who hold Disney’s cheesier live-action flops like Tomorrowland & John Carter of Mars in much higher regard than they probably deserve. That’s probably a large part of why I got such a huge kick out of 2011’s Captain America: The First Avenger. At heart, this is director Joe Johnston remaking his commercial flop for Disney, The Rocketeer, into a much more successful film. I know Marvel Studios gets a lot of flack for valuing a “house style” over individual director’s visions, but I think they got the formula right here.They seemingly matched an already-appropriate director to the style they wanted, something mildly attempted by bringing in Shakespearean vet Kenneth Branagh for Thor, but brought to its full collaborative potential with Johnston’s Captain America. I really like The Rocketeer, but it’s a deeply flawed movie. Captain America recreates The Rocketeer‘s Nazi-punching retro-future with no discernible flaws or blemishes. It achieves the exact aesthetic it aims for with few to no missteps. It’s essentially a perfect superhero movie, easily ranking up there with Batman Returns & The Dark Knight as the best I’ve ever seen. And although it’s more closely associated with being a Marvel property than existing under the larger Disney umbrella, I do believe it snugly fits with the old-fashioned earnestness of the flops mentioned above.

From the outside looking in, I wasn’t exactly sure why I had been seeing so much Captain America merch around lately. Captain America t-shirts & jackets are seemingly becoming just as ubiquitous as Hulk Hands were in the early 2000s, except without the iconic quirkiness of the product design to explain the merch sales. I totally get the appeal now. Chris Evans’ Cap is perfectly charming in his 1940s “just a kid from Brooklyn” moxie, especially once he explains that he’s desparate to enlist as a soldier in World War II not to kill Nazis, exactly, but because he can’t stand bullies. So far in the MCU, our heroes have been an ivy league academic of a scientist, a billionaire playboy arms dealer, and a Norse god. Against these titans, Captain America/Steve Rogers stands as the little guy . . . literally. Through a surprisingly smooth bit of CGI magic Chris Evans is shrunken down into a scrawny little baby of a protagonist with a long list of health problems that prevents him from enlisting in the Army. As opposed to the Hulk’s experiment-gone-wrong origins, Captain stands as an experiment-gone-right. A kindly scientist (Stanley Tucci) sees as much potential in Steve Rogers’ moxie as the audience does, and with a little help from Tony Stark’s eccentric bajillionaire daddy (who looks nothing at all like a young John Slattery, by the way) transforms the Captain into the muscled-up beefcake superhero Evans embodies so well. Captain America is a 100% earnest, sarcasmless virgin who physically cannot get drunk. He’s essentially the antithesis of Tony Stark & it’s a welcome change of pace for the franchise at large.

Captain America is a too-good-to-be-true ideal of an American super-soldier, something straight out of a propaganda reel. My favorite part of this film is the way it accentuates that idea instead of downplaying it. Both sides of the war are greatly exaggerated as a Defender of the Free World, Captain’s weapon is a shield made of unobtanium, uh, vibranium & instead of fighting run-of-the-mill Nazis, he faces a futuristic force of futuristic super-Nazis equipped with laser cannons & lead by the even-worse-than-Hitler monster villain Red Skull (whose CGI design is even more impressive than scrawny Rogers’). More importantly, before Captain finds a particular use for himself in the Army, he’s employed as a public face for the war’s propaganda machine, marking the first time I can recall where a Marvel character (if not any superhero at large) exists in a world where he stars in comic books & movies. That’s such a cool idea. An even cooler idea is what happens when he actually starts fighting in the war & the movie devolves into an actual winning-the-war-effort montage instead of faking one. It’s one hell of a callback to the earlier propaganda montage, not to mention a fascinating bit of meta narrative play, and it works like gangbusters.

A lesser film would’ve tried to turn Captain America’s inherent cheese into something darker, grittier, but Joe Johnston’s The First Avenger embraces the cheese wholesale. Far removed from the post-Dark Knight doom & gloom casting its shadow over most blockbusters in recent years, Captain America first introduces its hero in costume selling war bonds at a USO show & first using a shield by wielding a trash can lid in a back alley brawl. This line of irreverent, but wholesome humor is balanced expertly with some surprisingly severe touches, especially in the introduction of Hydra as a worse-than-Nazis force to be reckoned with & in its higher-than-usual wartime bodycount (which includes a kill that might stand as the best propeller death since The Titanic). I said in our Thor review that I wasn’t sure exactly when the MCU became the cutting edge of superhero cinema, since the first few films felt oddly old-fashioned. It’s curious that a film set in the 1940s stands as the first glimpse of the franchise’s transition into becoming the modern standard. It’s a thoroughly fun watch, but stands as the MCU’s most brutally violent film at the time of its release, striking a more or less perfect balance. I’ve heard that 2014’s Captain America: Winter Soldier is an even better example of the superhero film as a genre, but it’s difficult for me to imagine it getting much better than what’s accomplished here.

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fourhalfstar

­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­Boomer: I wasn’t terribly impressed with Captain America (I hate the subtitle) the first time I saw it. I remember that the frail bodied Steve Rogers looked really silly on the big screen, which put me in the wrong frame of mind from the outset. This wasn’t my only complaint either; I didn’t care for the way that the film seemed to go out of its way, from very early in the runtime, to focus its attention on Hydra as a proxy for the Nazi forces rather than on Hitler’s forces proper. I also hated the way that Cap’s war experiences were condensed into a single montage, which I felt undermined the character’s relevance as a long­-term soldier. Looking back, though, I can’t believe I was such a stick in the mud about it.

This is a delightful movie and represents a continued positive change in the MCU’s direction with regards to protagonist characterization. Steve Rogers is the polar opposite of Tony Stark from the ground up and represents the better angels of our nature. He’s the kind of self-sacrificing role model you or I hope we would have the temerity to be should we be given great power (while Tony is a genius bro who uses his great intellect to build toys for himself and cover his sex and substance abuse issues while only working toward the greater good when he has no real choice). Evans is also the perfect choice to play Cap. There are plenty of men wandering around Hollywood with the physical presence needed to fill out the Cap suit, but Evans brings a humility and humanity to the role that could easily have been lost if casting was only looking for the perfect human specimen (which isn’t to say Evans isn’t, because damn). This could be difficult to pull off, as there really isn’t that much of a character arc for Cap this go­-round; he experiences a lot of changes that don’t affect his characterization up to the loss of Bucky, which is a flaw in the film’s design but also allows room for the character to grow over the course of the films to come.

Sebastian Stan doesn’t seem to be given a lot to work with here, but as obsessive Stan fans on Tumblr who have vivisected all of his scenes with long essays in effort to delineate character moments have shown us, he does some great work with his background role. The casting of Tommy Lee Jones as yet another irascible veteran badass is a little on-­the-­nose, but he’s a lot of fun to watch in his gruffness and begrudging respect, even if it is all a little rote. Dominic Cooper in particular deserves praise for differentiating the elder Stark from his son, embodying many of the same qualities while also demonstrating grief and self-­doubt, effectively portraying a greater depth of character in Howard’s supporting role than we’ve seen in two featured appearances from Tony. On the other hand, Hugo Weaving’s Red Skull was far too over­-the­-top, calling to mind Raul Julia’s portrayal of M. Bison in the terrible Street Fighter adaptation. Toby Jones’s Zola was likewise poorly executed, as his simpering and faux­-sycophancy was obnoxious; every time the villainous duo was onscreen, the film devolved into a bit of a cartoon. Of course, all of this pales in comparison to the introduction of Hayley Atwell’s Peggy Carter, a.k.a. the Best! MCU! Character!, even if there are moments in this introductory chapter that undermine her badassery (i.e., her apparent jealousy).

Johnston’s experience with period drama and action do the film a great service. Markus and McFeely wouldn’t have been the first team I would have thought of to pen a Captain America flick, but their work on the Narnia adaptations means they, like Johnston with The Rocketeer, have also plied their trade at WWII­-era escapist fantasy period work as well. The pacing is a little strange, as the film invests a great deal of the first act in establishing Steve’s motivations and ideals, compresses all of Cap’s great and valorous wartime battles into three set pieces and one brief montage, and has an epilogue longer than one would expect in a standard action movie. The unusual plot structure helps the audience feel somewhat time-­lost, however, which adds to the film in equal measure to the extent that it detracts from it. The film also manages to set up future installments without that distracting from the cohesiveness of this film as well. Overall, this is the first truly great film of the MCU, and cemented, at least for me, the long term viability of this franchise.

­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­Lagniappe

Boomer: Continuity-­wise, Cap will, of course, go on to participate in the Avengers films, the first sequel The Winter Soldier, and the upcoming Phase Three flagship feature Civil War. Best MCU Character Peggy Carter has now appeared in more individual Marvel productions than any other character, with her appearance here and cameos in Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., Winter Soldier, Avengers: Age of Ultron, and Ant-­Man, and, of course, her leading role in Agent Carter (catch the premiere of Season 2 on January 19!). Dominic Cooper’s Howard Stark reappears on that series in a supporting role as well, but the film’s most far-­reaching addition to the MCU canon (other than Cap himself) is the first appearance of Hydra, which will have implications that reverberate way down the line. In non­-continuity news, I always forget that future Doctor Who companion Jenna Coleman and future Game of Thrones competitor Natalie Dormer are both in this film in small, inconsequential roles, so it’s a nice re-­surprise to see them here.

Brandon: My biggest gripe about the MCU as a whole has been its individual films’ shoutouts to outside properties often having no immediate consequence. There’s a little bit of that wankery going around here, mostly in a last minute Nick Fury cameo (as always) & in a post-credits stinger that promotes the then-upcoming Avengers crossover movie in a hilariously awful “You Wouldn’t Steal a DVD” editing style. For the most part, though, other Marvel properties are incorporated into the fold for more purposeful effect here. Daddy Stark is given an integral role in the creation of Captain America instead of merely making an appearance. Even more importantly, the MCU’s MacGuffin-at-large, the Infinity Stones, aren’t especially interesting in the abstract, but I don find it highly amusing that Hitler would be desperately seeking an Infinity Stone in this version of history. They even create a little bit of retroactive connective tissue here by making it perfectly logical that Tony Stark would be in possession of Cap’s shield in a throwaway gag in the previously-released Iron Man 2. Even if Nick Fury’s presence is again mostly inconsequential (as has been in the case in every MCU film besides Iron Man 2), they’re still working in the right direction here.

Combined S.W.A.M.P.F.L.I.X. Rating for Captain America: The First Avenger (2011)

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fourhalfstar

-Agents of S.W.A.M.P.F.L.I.X.

Agents of S.W.A.M.P.F.L.I.X.: Thor (2011)

/ swampflix / 18 Comments

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Superhero Watching: Alternating Marvel Perspectives, Fresh and Longterm, Ignoring X-Men, or S.W.A.M.P.F.L.I.X., is a feature in which Boomer (who reads superhero comics & is well versed in the MCU) & Brandon (who reads alternative comics & has thus far seen less than 25% of the MCU’s output) revisit the films that make up the Marvel Cinematic Universe from the perspective of someone who knows what they’re talking about & someone who doesn’t have the slightest clue.

Boomer: The ironic thing about the Marvel Cinematic Universe is that it owes so much to the success of Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man, but Thor owes its placement in the MCU to the failure of that series of films, although I’m getting ahead of myself. Sam Raimi initially conceived of making a Thor film after he finished production on 1990’s Darkman, one of the best films ever made about a costumed hero even before one takes into account that it was not based on a previous intellectual property. This project never got off the ground, but after the success of Bryan Singer’s first X-Men film in 2000, interest in the potential of adapting Marvel’s Thunder God was renewed, although by that time it was being considered for a series adaptation for UPN. After a few years of discussion, the project was again tabled until Kevin Feige started dreaming up the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

In 2007, Mark Protosevich, fresh from having written the screenplay adaptation of the Will Smith vehicle I Am Legend, based on the novel by Richard Matheson, expressed interest in drafting a Thor script. That same year also saw the beginning of the definitive 21st Century arc for Thor comics in the wake of Civil War, penned by J. Michael Straczynski. Straczynski was already well known in nerd circles for having created Babylon 5 (and would become even more so following the publication of One More Day, the notorious Spider-Man arc in which Peter Parker makes a deal with Mephisto that costs him his marriage and unborn child). This new direction, envisioning a newly recreated Asgard hovering over farmland in the American breadbasket, featured interaction between Asgardians like Thor, Sif, and Balder and locals. You can see a definite influence from that story in this film, even if the specifics are quite different.

Ultimately, both Protosevich and Straczynski ended up with story credit on this film, with the screenplay credit going to Ashley Edward Miller & Zach Stentz alongside Don Payne (the ampersand here indicating that Stentz and Miller worked together on their version of the script). Stentz and Miller had also previously worked together on television series as varied as Andromeda, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, and Fringe, where they created the scripts for several episodes of the second season, including the premiere. The last screenwriter, Don Payne, had a series of one-to-two episode stints on utterly forgotten sitcoms in the nineties, like Hope & Gloria, Pride & Joy, Men Behaving Badly, and something called The Brian Benben Show. His breakthrough big screen work was 2006’s My Super Ex-Girlfriend, which is the antithesis of the above-cited Darkman, in that it is one of the worst films ever made about a costumed hero, even after taking into account those others which were not based on previous intellectual properties. As Payne also had the critically and popularly reviled 2007 Fantastic Four sequel on his C.V., there was much speculation about whether or not Thor would be the MCU’s first artistic and financial failure (which was later the speculative case for Guardians of the Galaxy and Ant-Man).

At the same time, over at Sony, the Spider-Man series was running out of steam. The goodwill that was built up by the first two films had been virtually obliterated by the backlash against the third when it was released in 2007. Jokes about Peter Parker’s pseudogoth makeover following his bonding with the Venom symbiote persist to this day, even after an entire reboot series in the interregnum between Tobey Maguire and the new kid set to reappear when Spidey finally shows up in the MCU. A script for a fourth film was solicited, and concept art even appeared in Wizard Magazine showing designs for the costumes of Vulture and his daughter (supposedly to have eventually been played by John Malkovich and Anne Hathaway, which seemed farfetched even then). Ultimately, however, Spider-Man 4 was cancelled following friction between Raimi and Sony, and the release date for Thor was bumped up. Kenneth Branagh, who was most well known for his adaptations of Shakespeare, including Much Ado About Nothing and As You Like It, was brought on as director. With such a long time in development limbo and with so many fingers in the pot creatively, there was much debate as to whether Branagh’s film would be any good.

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three star

Brandon: At this point in the MCU’s trajectory I was just desperately hoping for a movie that didn’t involve Tony Stark in any way. It’s no surprise, then, that Thor ended up being my favorite film in the franchise so far, especially since I had set the bar so underachievingly low. The silliness is cranked to deliriously enjoyable heights in this film, a nice change from the wealthy douche fantasy fulfillment of the Iron Man movies & the somber romance machinations of The Incredible Hulk. Thor is essentially a fish-out-of-water action comedy about a Norse god stranded in Modern Times America once he is banished from an Oz-looking palace on a planet where gods live for being “nothing but a little boy trying to prove himself a man.” This is a film where a one-eyed Anthony Hopkins plays a space lord in a golden Jack Kirby getup similar to Skeletor’s at the end of Golan-Globus’ Masters of the Universe. Idris Elba, also playing a golden space lord, serves as a “Gatekeeper” for a “rainbow bridge” that can transport these gods to any location in the Universe (although they often end up settling for America, because of course they would). And then there’s the copious amounts of lush, reverent shots of a magical mallet, a.k.a. Thor’s hammer. It’s all quite ridiculous.

The comedy didn’t work nearly as well in Iron Man because it was coming from a nasty, misogynistic place. The Incredible Hulk had flashes of comedy spread throughout its runtime, but they were mostly buried under an overwhelmingly grim tone. After watching the self-absorbed antics of a playboy billionaire & the pensive longing of a blood-poisoned scientist, it was thoroughly refreshinging to watch an empty-headed, naive, absurdly trusting bimbo of an ancient god bumble his way through political relations between warring planets & through the logistics of life in modern America. And because Thor is played by handsome/buff/charming actor Christ Hemsworth, there’s an absurd lean towards shirtless beefcake here that’s a nice change after two movies’ worth of Tony Stark’s grotesque womanizing. Natalie “What Is She Doing Here?” Portman is also pretty refreshing as Thor’s Earthling arm candy, which is somehow less gross than it is when Tony Stark’s endless parade of faceless hotties fill that role. It’s at the very least amusing when Portman’s smitten scientist easily gives in to her boy-toy’s explanation of the Universe’s nine realms & his own origins in a place “where science & magic are one & the same”, disregarding all skepticism that would be necessary for her to sustain a career in her field.

I’m not saying that the film is entirely successful. It’s just that it’s silly enough to pass as an entertaining trifle. Most of what gets in the way of Thor being a thoroughly winning film is director Kenneth Branagh’s over-reaching personal style. I know that it’s a common complaint that Marvel Studios doesn’t allow for enough of a personalized touch in its films & relies heavily on a “house style” (especially considering the way they homogenized the typically-recognizable work of Edgar Wright & James Gunn), but I gotta say that most visual traces of Branagh’s touch are distracting in this particular case. I suppose he was well suited for the task based on the Shakespearean nature of Thor’s home life on the magical god planet Asgard, but the melodrama is laid on fairly thick here. Far worse is the director’s perverse use of Dutch angles, tilting the camera so drastically left to right to back again that I swear it was mounted to a seesaw. The effect was downright nauseating. There were also some generic superhero movie problems afoot here presumably out of Branagh’s control. The CGI “Frost Giants” serve as pretty bland, vaguely-defined villains. Tom Hiddleston’s Loki has a thoroughly unsurprising heel turn in the second act (Could anyone ever buy him as a “good guy”? Don’t answer that). There’s a pretty annoying false-death crisis (or “Disney Death” if you will) in the third act, etc.

None of these faults register as too tragic, though. For the most part Thor is a decent example of what sets the MCU apart from other post-Dark Knight superhero franchises: lighthearted humor. This a fun, dumb movie, one with irreverent gags like its alien god protagonist demanding that a strip mall pet store provide a horse or a dog/cat/bird large enough to ride & getting called a “dumbass” when he mindlessly wanders into traffic. I suppose they mostly made this tonal choice to contrast the ridiculous/large-scale power its Norse god hero holds in comparison to the blood-poisoned scientist & rich douche with a mech suit heroes in the films prior. Whatever the reason, it was a welcome glimpse into the mindless fun of films I had previously seen from this “universe” before starting this project: the two Avengers movies, Ant-Man, and Guardians of the Galaxy. It makes me a lot more eager to continue watching how this whole thing unfolds, as opposed to how Jon Favreau’s Iron Man movies were beating me down.

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fourhalfstar
Boomer: I was a little nervous about rewatching this film. It was the first MCU movie that I saw in theaters (in 3D, even, because some of my friends were a little slow to realize what a cheap and useless gimmick that is and always has been); in fact, we went to the opening night, and I still have the half-sized poster the ticket taker handed out to prove it. Iron Man and The Incredible Hulk had failed to make a huge impact on me even though I found them passable, but I was more hesitant to commit to a Thor movie. I had only been introduced to Thor as a character (outside of his involvement in Avengers and crossover events) as of the Straczynski run mentioned above. This was a character with a very involved backstory and so many supporting characters that I wasn’t certain how that would translate to the screen; moreover, this was a character that actually mattered to me as a reader, and I was almost certain it was bound to fail. My expectations were overturned, and I remember walking out of Thor and immediately texting several of my nerd friends in other cities about how it was one of the best comic book movies I had ever seen.

My concerns that the movie would not hold up turned out to be unfounded as well. The market saturation of the MCU and the omnipresence of superhero narratives has dulled a bit of the movie’s shine (not to mention some serious Loki fatigue brought on by the continual revisitation of that character), but it still holds up as a fun movie that manages to lend gravitas to the more outlandish and potentially cheesy ideas. Although it borrows the same tired opening structure as Iron Man—a bunch of characters in a vehicle encounter an event, and then the film flashes back to show the audience “how we got here”—the film makes this stupid in-media-res-then-[x time]-earlier thing seem fresh. In fact, considering that the film credits the story and script to a cumulative five people, the narrative is surprisingly streamlined and internally consistent, never splitting focus to the point where the audience becomes bored (as was the case with Iron Man 2).

I have to admit that I have never seen any of Branagh’s Shakespeare adaptations, but coming from that world probably made him the person best suited to helm this film, especially considering that the title character and his entourage were always based more on Shakespearean drama than real Norse myth anyway. The Thor books always used characters from a largely dead religion with great dramatic license; one of the most noteworthy things about Marvel’s Thor is that he has blond hair, but traditional Norse Thor has a fiery red mane and beard. It’s fine that the comics (and thus the films) deviate from tradition, and it’s much more fun to accept the Elizabethan speech patterns than try to rationalize them. The plot is like someone threw a Shakespeare anthology into a blender with some Norse characters and made a smoothie that was not merely palatable but compelling: a Lear-like Odin has unwittingly instigated a rivalry between his roguish natural-born son and the Iago-esque son he adopted; he realizes that his son is not yet fit to lead, to so he banishes him to a far-off land to teach him a lesson, but falls ill before the prodigal’s return, allowing his even more ill-suited, manipulative son to take the throne.

Thor could easily come off as terribly unlikable (and some parts of the internet will defend any interpretation of the film which lends itself to positing that Thor was a bully and Loki was justified in his actions by default), but Chris Hemsworth deftly treads the line between aggression and exuberance. Ultimately, he keeps Thor sympathetic and the audience is invested in his evolution from an immature prince to knowledgeable leader with enough wisdom to know that he is not ready to be king but will be one day. Tom Hiddleston is also quite good in his role, and I really enjoyed watching his manipulations this time around. It’s hard to divorce the role from the overwhelming outpouring of Loki apologia that has haunted particular corners of Tumblr for the past five years, but he does well in keeping Loki grounded. Sure, Loki wants More! Power! just like Obadiah Stane, Justin Hammer, and General Ross, but this desire stems less from the lust for power itself and more from his need to demonstrate his worthiness to his father. Of course, whether or not that’s actually the case or just one more of his manipulations is never made utterly clear, which is what makes him so interesting.

As a character and in theory, Thor had the potential to be just as much of a jerkass as Tony Stark; as the potential future leader of the highest realm, he was an even greater child of privilege than Stark was (as much as Howard Stark swaggers, I sincerely doubt he ever gave Tony a “all the light touches will one day be yours” speech). The film is well served by focusing on his depowered earthbound adventures, as this allows Thor to be a newcomer who must learn the ways of the new world in which he finds himself. Instead of your typical origin story, this is a spiritual journey in which a man who believes that his way is the only way and that peace can only be achieved with subjugation becomes a man who understands the importance of self-sacrifice and the realizes that the most virtuous use of power is to show mercy. Those are hardly groundbreaking concepts, but they’re larger and more thoughtful than the topics tackled in superhero films before this point, and Thor represents a step in the right direction towards more heady ideas and more inventive plot structures for the MCU.

There’s a lot to love here, from the humor of Thor’s exploration of Midgard, the great interactions between Jane and her crew of ragtag science outsiders, Thor’s confrontations with S.H.I.E.L.D. and the early-bird introduction of Hawkeye, the incredible performance that Idris Elba brings to a largely thankless part, Anthony Hopkins’s pitch-perfect Odin, etc. In fact, the only element that rings a little false is Jane and Thor’s relationship, which moves too fast. As a narrative weakness, that’s pretty common, and may even be part of the intentional Shakespeare atmosphere, but it doesn’t irreparably harm the movie. Overall, this was the first truly good MCU flick, and proved that there was potential for Marvel projects that weren’t based on names with which mainstream audiences were already familiar.

Lagniappe

Brandon: Although I enjoyed this film more than any other entry in the MCU so far, it did backslide a bit in terms of making its inter-connected universe count for something. The exciting development in Iron Man 2 was that it finally gave non-Iron Man Marvel characters something significant to do in an Iron Man film, namely ScarJo’s Black Widow & Sam Jackson’s Nick Fury. Here, Nick Fury is again relegated to post-credits stinger status & future-Avenger Hawkeye basically just pops into acknowledge that he exists. There’s also a quick, throwaway reference to Iron Man in a climactic battle with a space robot where one of the members of S.H.I.E.L.D. asks “Is that one of Stark’s?”. Speaking of S.H.I.E.L.D., they’re actually given the most do here as connective tissue, acting as total Big Government dicks even though they’re essentially on the same team as the scientists they overpower. That was a nice touch. I’m still getting the sense in these early MCU films that the studio was getting too ahead of themselves in promising the next big spectacle where all of this will finally pay off (in the first Avengers film) instead of making it count for something in the moment.

It’s also throwing me off how out of date & behind the times these films feel. This is mostly detectable in Thor by taking a glance at free spirit/comic relief Darcy’s (Kat Denning’s) wardrobe. I’d swear that her awful hats & scarves where purchased sometime in the early 2000s & not in 2011 if I didn’t know any better. Similarly, Thor’s ragtag group of immortal ass-kicking buddies are amusingly out of step with what’s cool & what’s corny (although I suppose you could argue that some of that effect was intentional). At some point in its lineage the MCU became the cutting edge of superhero cinema. I’m still not seeing it yet.

Boomer: Josh Dallas’s Fandral looks really silly here. Like, really silly. Every time he appeared in a scene, it really took me out of the moment. Also, how strange is it that his daughter on Once Upon a Time is played by Jennifer Morrison, who in turn played the wife of Chris Hemsworth’s character in the Star Trek reboot? That has absolutely no bearing on this movie but felt it merited consideration. As for how Thor fits into the rest of the MCU, this film features the return of fan favorite Coulson, although S.H.I.E.L.D. is outright antagonistic for the first time in this film in a way that will be explored further down the line. This is also the first appearance of Agent Sitwell, who was a total non-entity to me the first time I saw Thor, but his appearance here is noteworthy based on what comes to light later. Also, in retrospect, I can’t believe it took four films to finally introduce a villain who would recur later in the franchise (not counting General Ross, who is set to reappear in Civil War). It’s just too bad they’ll go to the Loki well so soon and so often that this goodwill will wear out.

Combined S.W.A.M.P.F.L.I.X. Rating for Thor (2011)

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fourstar

-Agents of S.W.A.M.P.F.L.I.X.

Agents of S.W.A.M.P.F.L.I.X.: Iron Man 2 (2010)

/ swampflix / 10 Comments

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Superhero Watching: Alternating Marvel Perspectives, Fresh and Longterm, Ignoring X-Men, or S.W.A.M.P.F.L.I.X., is a feature in which Boomer (who reads superhero comics & is well versed in the MCU) & Brandon (who reads alternative comics & has thus far seen less than 25% of the MCU’s output) revisit the films that make up the Marvel Cinematic Universe from the perspective of someone who knows what they’re talking about & someone who doesn’t have the slightest clue.

Boomer: After the somewhat surprising success of Iron Man and the mostly tepid response to The Incredible Hulk, Marvel Studios allowed their product line to lie fallow for 2009. Instead, they spent most of their behind the scenes time conceptualizing and drafting the growing interconnected universe and putting forth just enough information to whet the appetites of the general public. Iron Man 2 in 2010! Thor and Captain America (which would later have the silly, unwieldy subtitle The First Avenger added to it) in 2011! Avengers in 2012! Iron Man 2 was heavily marketed in the U.S., but there was a distinct decline in the attention from film and comic trade papers compared to the whirlwind of publicity that surrounded the first picture. If anything, most of the hard copy from trade journals was less about the film itself and more about notable lunatic Terrence Howard’s exit and replacement by prestige performer Don Cheadle. Howard has claimed on separate occasions that he left the film of his own volition and that he was let go, the former statement having only recently become part of his repertoire of stories. Lately, his claim is that his departure was due to a vast pay discrepancy between himself and Robert Downey, Jr., but Howard is also infamously difficult to work with—just look no further than the madness that was his September Rolling Stone interview for proof. Imagine what it must be like to work with someone whose conceptualization of mathematics makes Time Cube seem straightforward in comparison. I would prefer working with class act Don Cheadle, too.

There’s not as much backstory about the history of this film, but the expansion of the cast is noteworthy. Of the four main actors appearing in the first film, only Gwyneth Paltrow and Downey reprise their roles, due to Howard’s exit and the death of Jeff Bridges’s character. Samuel L. Jackson’s role was expanded, and Mad Men actor John Slattery was cast to play Tony’s father Howard Stark in file footage. Sam Rockwell joined the cast as rival weapons mogul Justin Hammer, and Mickey Rourke, of all people, was cast as unrepentant Russian ex-con Ivan “Whiplash” Vanko. Even stranger, likable comedian Garry Shandling was brought on board to play blowhard politician Senator Stern. Most notably, the film introduced Scarlett Johansson as S.H.I.E.L.D. agent Natasha Romanoff, a.k.a. Black Widow, in a role that raised the profile of both actress and character significantly. Director Jon Favreau returned to helm the film and appear as Tony’s driver, “Happy” Hogan, and screenwriting duties were handed over to Justin Theroux, who is more recognizable as an actor in films like Mulholland Drive and American Psycho (and as the current Mr. Jennifer Aniston) than a writer. He also played the villain in Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle, following on the heels of Rockwell’s villainous turn in the first Angels film. Can the two of them working together make a decent Iron Man film? Read on for our reviews!

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twohalfstar

Brandon: Are we back to this dude already? Seems like just two films ago I was complaining about Tony Stark’s obnoxious rich boy D-bag fantasy fulfillment horror show of a personality. And here we are again, watching The Last of the Famous International Playboys work the crowd in his expensive suits & Guy Fieri sunglasses/goatee combos. As much as I would love to say I hated it even more the second time around, Jon Favreau’s second Iron Man film wasn’t nearly as bad as the first. Despite insistent warnings from friends that this would be the worst entry under the MCU brand to date, I found myself enjoying a great deal of the film, especially in moments where Mr. Stark was nowhere to be seen. Even though I could feel myself being won over, though, I think it’s much more that the MCU is growing on me & coming into its own than it is that this individual property is worth anything more than mixed praise.

The major improvement in Iron Man 2 is in the strength of its cast. Don Cheadle was a huge get in replacing Terrence Howard as Col. James Rhodes & it was super cool to see him fly around in a spare Iron Man suit, effectively establishing himself as the MCU’s first non-white superhero. Jon Slattery is as amusingly smug as ever in his role as Iron Dad. Gary Schandling & Sam Rockwell are always-welcome faces, even if the latter was asked to do such undignified things as blabbering about super-“cool”, super-deadly weapons to an obnoxious blues rock soundtrack. Scarlett Johansson is a refreshing glimpse into a better, future MCU in her kickass performance as the (undercover) Black Widow. Even the much-complained-about Gwyenth Paltrow gets a couple great moments in there, especially in her delivery of a particularly passionate line-reading of “ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR MIND?!”

The real MVP here, though, is Mickey Rourke. I suspect that Rourke’s performance as the oddly grandmotherly supervillain Ivan “Whiplash” Vanko wasn’t universally beloved by fans, but I was personally won over. I can’t be too objective about Rourke in this film because I’m pretty much on board with everything he’s done on film in the past 15 years or so. Even in dire properties that I have no patience for like Sin City & The Expendables, Rourke’s weird, hardened, subdued energy is a breath of fresh air. It’s hard to tell how much of this is leftover goodwill from how much I love him in Aronofsky’s The Wrestler, but it’s true all the same. Rourke’s softened, heavily tattooed Russian terrorist of a villain is easily the most deliciously over-the-top aspect of anything I’ve seen in the first three MCU entries. I loved everything about him, from his dumb girl’s-first-year-at-Burning-Man dreds to his fetish-inspiring lightning whips. When the film opens with Rourke’s oddly gentle brooding I was expecting to fall for Iron Man 2‘s charms . . . a feeling that lasted only briefly, as it was promptly interrupted by Iron Man flying around to AC/DC dad jams & my Iron Man 1 deja vu kicked in.

The problem with Iron Man 2 is not in the villains, but in Iron Man himself. I wasn’t convinced that Tony Stark’s reformed bad boy act in the first film outweighed his more unpalatable impulses as a rakish dick & he indeed dismisses his moral salvation in that film (an interest in renewable energy sources instead of military grade weapons) as a “liberal agenda” that he now finds boring here. I guess his new path to salvation is in his evolving romance plot with Pepper Potts. I’ll admit that I find the characters’ chemistry fairly compelling (way more than Ed Norton & Liv Tyler’s chemistry in The Incredible Hulk, at least), but there’s too much else working against Stark’s personality for it to save the movie for me. It’d be one thing if Stark’s go for broke narcissism were played as villainous, but it’s largely celebrated in the film. He’s applauded for “successfully privatizing world peace” without a trace of irony. He sexually objectifies the MCU’s first female superhero at first glance, joking “I want one of those” in ScarJo’s first scene, and the audience is supposed to think “Heh, heh me too”. And then there’s his love of a expensive-looking version of European NASCAR, Iron Gams chorus girls, and – worst yet – scratching records like an idiotic RoboDJ. Ugh. I’m surprised they stopped short of giving him a backwards baseball cap & a skateboard.

I could probably get behind Tony Stark’s persona if he were played as a villain, but he’s just too openly celebrated in the film for it to work for me. When he jokes about a beautiful woman standing next to his ride, “Does she come with the car?” we’re supposed to think “What a cool dude!” instead of “What a vile pig!”, which is the film’s main problem in a nutshell. Perhaps as his relationship with Potts develops the more grotesque aspects of his personality will soften, but for now I mostly find Stark to be a source of embarrassment. This isn’t helped at all by director Jon Favreau’s now-extended glorified cameo as Stark’s personal driver, since it confronts the viewer with the film’s oddly conservative power fantasy looking us in the eye, desperately hoping some of his creation’s supposed cool will rub off on him.

There’s so much going on in Iron Man 2 that had me rooting for the film – mostly in the superhero/villain antics of ScarJo, Rourke, and Cheadle. It’s just a shame that Iron Man had to get in the way of what makes Iron Man 2 work. When one character warns Stark, “The device keeping you alive is also killing you” I found myself thinking, “Would his death really be so bad for this franchise?” I doubt that was the desired effect.

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three star

Boomer: When Brandon told me that he had watched this film, I expressed my sympathies and referred to IM2 as the nadir of the MCU. Upon rewatch, however, this film was a lot better than I remembered, and outpaces The Incredible Hulk easily. The problem, I think, is that I had never actually sat through the entire film from beginning to end without commercial interruption, which bloats the already overlong film out to an interminable three hours and exacerbates the film’s pacing problems as well. It’s not great, but there were a lot more fun elements present than I remembered. Unfortunately, those moments are buried under a mountain of bizarre acting choices, miscast roles, and about 50% more subplots than any film should try to support.

How many subplots are there? Do we define the main plot as “Tony Stark attempts to find the cure for the blood toxicity problem caused by his arc reactor,” given that this would presuppose that “Tony faces off against the son of a man from whom his father may have stolen ideas” is not also the main plot? Of course, that would also further presuppose that “Tony faces off against the spoiled, rich weapons manufacturer who he could have been (and kinda is)” is not also the main plotline. Right away, the fact that all three of these ideas are primary narratives in their own right means that the film is overloaded. Then there are all the subplots: the Senate subcommittee hearings, the tension between Tony and Rhodey as the latter is pressured by the government to obtain an Iron Man suit, Pepper’s promotion to CEO of Stark Industries, the introduction and integration of Black Widow and the reveal of her true alliances, the uneasy alliance between Vanko and Hammer, Tony coming to understand his father’s real legacy and accept their emotional distance, and Tony forging a new element (“LOL” -everyone who paid even the barest minimum attention in high school chemistry). Every time the film changes scenes, you find yourself thinking “Oh, right, these people are doing things in this movie too; I forgot.” There are too many sequences in the film, and by the final act, there’s such a sense of narrative fatigue that you can hardly bring yourself to care.

A lot of the performances are flat and, frankly, terrible. ScarJo’s Black Widow had a lot of presence in the first Avengers film, and her appearance in Captain America: The Winter Soldier is far and away one of the best things in an inarguably fantastic film, but here, she’s wooden and unlikable. There are a few moments in which her emotionless seems like a façade (the way she drops her smile when Happy makes dismissive and sexist assumptions about her physical prowess is a nicely underplayed moment, actually), but it’s obvious that she had a hard time finding this character. Of course, given that her character seems poorly thought out on paper as well, this is hardly a surprise. Paltrow’s Pepper is also more of a damsel in this film than she was in the last, which is a disappointment, and Cheadle’s Rhodey is written as decisive in his actions but easily swayed in his motivations; both of them feel like they were written down in this installment in praise of the almighty Tony Stark.

Speaking of which, Tony Stark is a self-important blowhard who lacks humility, not entirely unlike Downey (who’s basically a white Kanye with an ego that the general public doesn’t police as heavily because of his whiteness); in order to make him more likable, his villains have to be utterly devoid of any redeeming features that could accidentally render them sympathetic. Ivan Vanko can’t just be a prodigal son seeking revenge on the child of the man who he believes stole his father’s legacy, he has to be a criminal who sold uranium to terrorists, and his father must also have been involved in wartime espionage. Senator Stern can’t possibly be presented as someone with reasonable objections to Tony Stark’s self-described privatization of worldwide peacekeeping; he has to be a barely-competent parody of fear-mongering, war-hungry senatorial arrogance. And Justin Hammer can’t just be a rival industrialist who wants to experience the successes that seem to come so easy to Tony Stark; he has to be a spoiled brat infatuated with his own decadent lifestyle and possessed of the misconception that he is capable of being intimidating, with occasional bouts of impotent rage.

Everyone in this movie feels like they’re slumming it, and the bad performances I mentioned earlier really show through in regards to the villains. Sam Rockwell is particularly terrible. I mentioned above that this movie has a longer running time than is necessary or warranted, and the film doesn’t have to be as long as it is, either. It’s unusual to feel a film’s length because of performative choices, but a good five percent of this film consists of Rockwell (and, to a lesser extent, Downey) repeating and repeating their lines, not for emphasis but as filler. Every scene that Rockwell is in feels interminable, and it only gets worse once he breaks Vanko out of prison and enlists him to make Hammer’s failed experiments moderately functional, with Rourke’s choices as the Russian criminal/mechanical genius almost (but not quite) working based purely on their sheer audacity. Without these two characters, almost nothing of substance would have been lost (less the Monaco racing/action sequence, which was a better set piece than the overloaded finale and a highlight of the film). Further, more time could have been spent focusing on the way Tony’s self-destructive behavior pushed his friends away, rather than abbreviating that plot point.

Overall, Iron Man 2 is a film that is overburdened by too many ideas, only half of which should have made it past the first draft. Returning characters are marginalized in lieu of introducing two major villains, when the plot of Tony’s poisoning and his completion of his father’s legacy would have been sufficient to carry a grounded and compelling film. Instead, those interesting narratives become so lost in the shuffle that by the time Tony invents his new element (LOL) you’ve already forgotten why he needs to. Still, I’d put it on nearly the same level as the first film, even if it doesn’t come together as coherently in the end.

Lagniappe

Brandon: Iron Man 2 feels like the MCU finally coming into its own. I get frustrated when the individual movies include references to other MCU properties with no in-the-moment consequence besides promoting The Next Big Show. There are indeed a few MCU calling cards left on the table here with no purpose for the task at hand – Captain America’s shield, Thor’s hammer, an envelope that reads “The Avengers Initiative” – but they’re isolated moments in a more general push to truly get the ball rolling. The biggest change here is that the characters of Sam Jackson’s Nick Fury & ScarJo’s Black Widow are given more to do than just to pop in & acknowledge their own existence. A move away from brief cameos toward active involvement is an important one. When Black Widow gets her hands dirty kicking nameless goons’ asses towards the film’s climax the crossover potential of MCU properties finally, excitingly sees some payoff. If it weren’t for Mickey Rourke’s lightning whips weirdness it would’ve been my favorite moment in a film that almost worked for me (when its titular “hero” protagonist wasn’t getting in the way).

Boomer: This film is really the first one in which a larger universe feels like it’s beginning to unfold, as evidenced by Nick Fury’s exasperation at having to deal with Tony Stark’s emotional problems when he has bigger fish to fry. Hammer and Vanko are distinctly disposable villains in a way that Obadiah Stane was not, which makes the decision to kill him off in the first film even more shortsighted; theoretically, we could see Hammer reappear, but it hasn’t happened yet, and I’m glad for it. Johansson will have solidified Natasha’s character by the time of her next appearance, and she definitely goes on to be one of my favorite things about the MCU as a whole. Even though I complained about the paper-thin characterization of Senator Stern above, I’m looking forward to his later appearances. Finally, one of the things that I really disliked about this film is that Tony, even when he is staring his mortality in the face, never seems to feel the weight of his impending death in a way that matures him; I’m looking forward to rewatching Iron Man 3, which I remember having the most depth of character of all three, despite its poor reputation.

Combined S.W.A.M.P.F.L.I.X. Rating for Iron Man 2 (2010)

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three star

-Agents of S.W.A.M.P.F.L.I.X.

Agents of S.W.A.M.P.F.L.I.X.: The Incredible Hulk (2008)

/ swampflix / 13 Comments

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Superhero Watching: Alternating Marvel Perspectives, Fresh and Longterm, Ignoring X-Men, or S.W.A.M.P.F.L.I.X., is a feature in which Boomer (who reads superhero comics & is well versed in the MCU) & Brandon (who reads alternative comics & has thus far seen less than 25% of the MCU’s output) revisit the films that make up the Marvel Cinematic Universe from the perspective of someone who knows what they’re talking about & someone who doesn’t have the slightest clue.

Boomer: In our previous installment, we talked about how Marvel managed to keep itself afloat in dark financial times by licensing its properties to other companies across different media platforms, which led to many Marvel characters being distributed to different film studios. This was a move that saved the company while causing other issues down the line, but even when playing from a disadvantage, Marvel’s lawyers knew how to build in failsafes. After the mixed box office reception to Ang Lee’s meditative but pretentious and reviled 2003 film Hulk, Universal Pictures failed to produce a sequel within the appropriate timeframe required to retain the rights to the character (which, as you may recall from Brandon’s Fantastic Four review, was the reason Roger Corman’s notorious FF film exists). The rights to the character reverted to Marvel, with Universal merely distributing. Writer Zak Penn, who had written a previous Hulk treatment script ten years before, was brought on to write the first draft of the script for The Incredible Hulk, which was initially planned as a sequel to Ang Lee’s film. The 2006 and 2007 trade papers referred to the film as such and stated that the character of Bruce Banner had been recast with Ed Norton, while heavily implying that everyone else would reprise their roles. The script Penn turned in was designed to begin welding together the larger interfilm universe, which means it was very nearly the case that the Lee Hulk was technically the first MCU film.

Ultimately, this bullet was dodged when Marvel eschewed the sequel nature of the project and instead chose to treat this as the MCU’s introduction to the Hulk. There are still some parts of the final draft that are obviously left over from earlier versions (General Ross at one point states, for instance, that Banner has been on the run for five years—the same length of time between the Lee film and this one). Gone are the melodramatic contemplations of Lee’s film; gone too are most of the elements of the Hulk’s origins, replaced with a montage sequence played over the opening credits that encapsulates how Banner and the Hulk came to exist and borrowing extensively from the imagery of the 1970s Incredible Hulk TV series.

Norton himself performed an overhaul on the script, and the reportage and history of what happened next are contentious. Some articles printed at the time seemed to state that Norton had edited the script with the studio’s blessing, and he claimed to have edited it so extensively as to deserve a writing credit. To this day it’s not entirely clear why he went this far (although the potential to collect royalties as both an actor and a writer certainly makes it worth an attempt), but there was hostility behind the scenes, with Penn upset that Norton was claiming he “wrote” the script and the WGA having to get involved, ultimately siding with Penn. Although Norton isn’t named for this contribution in the film’s actual credit reel, the publicity surrounding the issue made it a moot point, and the fact that Marvel had recast the Hulk yet again by his next appearance in 2011 does strongly imply that Norton might have been considered a problem, even forgetting that he already has a reputation for being difficult to work with. Still, the new and improved Incredible Hulk was well-received in its day, with most criticism comparing it to the previous film and praising its improvements. But, would and can it be appreciated now, as a film so distanced from the failures of its predecessor that it can’t simply be judged as being better than it? Can it be enjoyed as a solo film, divorced from its context for fans of the MCU and Marvel Comics in general?

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twostar

Brandon: Okay, I have so many questions about just what in the living fuck is going on in Not-Ang-Lee’s Hulk movie, but I guess the most pressing one is about the film’s quality. Is it a hot mess, a hopelessly mediocre bore, or a mixed bag floating somewhere between either extreme? Is it possible that it could be all three?

Even having just watched The Incredible Hulk for the first time, I have no idea where to land on a solid assessment, which isn’t a good sign in terms of the film’s overall quality. It’s at least pretty easy to point out what doesn’t work here. The casting is all wrong, first off.  Any “Hey that’s not Ed Norton!” awkwardness that must’ve cropped up when Hulk reappeared in the first Avengers film was well worth the transition into Mark Ruffalo’s reign as the Angry Green Giant. Norton is far from the only miscast role (any movie where Liv Tyler is more than a supporting player raises an instant red flag for me), but because he plays the titular beast, his presence is a huge drag on the film. I genuinely enjoy Norton as an actor & he’s engaging enough in Bruce Banner form, but his CGI Hulk incarnation feels entirely removed, like it couldn’t possibly be the same person as Banner. That’s not an effect you want in a Dr. Jekyll/Mr Hyde situation. Another easily recognizable flaw is the film’s CGI itself, which is so excessive, empty, and flat that I can’t believe the Marvel folks (successfully) gambled to bring the character back in The Avengers. And that’s not even to mention some leftover late 90s/early 00s visual cheese (including a Matrix-like view into the Internet) that could’ve been lifted from such shitfests as Swordfish or XXX or, hell, the also seemingly-outdated Iron Man from the very same year. At some point the MCU became the cutting edge in superhero cinema (especially considering how the still on-going, seemingly endless parade of grim Dark Knight knockoffs choose to dwell in the past) but in 2008 it felt at least five years behind the times.

But, you know what? Complaining about comic book movies on the Internet is such a cliché at this point that I fell the urge at this point to mention that 2008’s The Incredible Hulk is far from a total wash. At the very least I appreciated that it sidestepped a by-the-numbers origin story narrative (perhaps in an attempt to learn from Ang Lee’s mistakes) & relegated Bruce Banner’s “gamma poisoning” past to a quick Hulk Cam montage during the opening credits. The movie also seemed to be well aware of how flat & false its CGI looked, making conscious efforts to hide its Hulking Out transformations in the shadows, the way an old school monster movie would. There are also some spare weird ideas here or there that make the journey almost-worthwhile (the blood gallery, a blood-contaminated bottle of not-Surge, and Tim Roth’s rival Hulk monstrosity Abomination come to mind), as well as some decent, humorous irreverence, like when Banner poorly translates his infamous catchphrase to “You wouldn’t like me when I’m hungry.” I’d be a total liar, though, if I didn’t admit that my favorite moment of the whole film was Lou Ferrigno’s featured cameo as a nameless security guard. It’s a sublimely silly moment in a movie that could’ve used more of them. My picture of the writer’s room for The Incredible Hulk is Michael Bluth urging his son George Michael to “keep your head down & power through.” For all of its occasional virtues, the film often feels hopelessly dutiful, necessary to further the MCU narrative, but never establishing its own individual purpose.

In the end, I get the sense that The Incredible Hulk is a mostly forgettable entry on the MCU landscape. Mark Ruffalo’s re-casting of the role was honestly a godsend for the franchise. Norton is a gifted actor, but he was entirely wrong for the role, a feeling that’s only reaffirmed by my giddiness over seeing Lou Ferrigno’s appearance, since Ferrigno is The Hulk. Still, the film’s not quite bad enough to be outright hate-worthy like the dad rock soundtracked, wealthy D-bag fantasy fulfilment of Iron Man. If nothing else,  The Incredible Hulk is a difficult film to pin down. I didn’t like it, but I couldn’t fully dismiss it.

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three star

Boomer: I hadn’t seen The Incredible Hulk since it first came to DVD over half a decade ago. During the intermittent times that I happened to have cable, FX never had quite the hard-on for re-running this film that it did for the first two Iron Man flicks and, about a year ago, Captain America and Thor, although I do remember a time when it felt like the Lee Hulk aired at least twice a week. As a result, I have more memories of watching that picture than this one. The 2003 film is in many ways a very flawed enterprise, although within the past year the internet at large has noted that it might be worth reappraisal; I’m not sure that I agree, as the film is almost inarguably a failure, but I also appreciate that the things that it attempted and failed at were weighty and introspective. It stands out because it tried to be an exploration of too many ideas: mad science experimentation, the lingering traumas of child abuse, military dominance, the interconnectedness and fragility of the ecosystem, and the duality of how two lovers exist within their relationships to and with their respective fathers, to name a few. Then, Lee paired those concepts with bizarre cinematic experiments like transitions and multi-angle shots inspired by the paneled nature of the comics page. It’s an attempt to fuse a superhero narrative with art film composition, but the demands of those two disparate approaches to film as a medium ended up making a muddled mess of ideas.

So, of course Incredible Hulk was more well-liked, although its concepts are smaller in their successes than Hulk was in its failures. Even at the time, it was noteworthy for its starpower, the one-two punch of Norton and Robert Downey Jr. both appearing in superhero movies in the same year going a long way to legitimize the growing MCU and the exponential growth of comic adaptations as a genre, paving the way for a decade that has seen both The Walking Dead and Jonah Hex brought to life. Of course, getting the star of such award-attracting fare as American History X and The 25th Hour was a good idea—that backfired on both sides of the camera. Norton intentionally plays up Banner’s social awkwardness and makes him seem like much more of a weirdo, imbuing the character with a lot of traits that make the performance seem overthought and out of place rather than organic. On the one hand, I want to praise the film for not attempting to play up Norton’s Banner as a hunky scientist and instead treat him as the kind of average-looking, highly-intelligent guy who spent most of his adolescence and adulthood in a lab. On the other hand, the film still expects us to buy that this kinda nerdy biologist had an intensely loving and powerful relationship with Betty Ross. Don’t get me wrong: I’m not saying that I have difficulty accepting that Betty and Bruce would fall in love with each other, or that there’s anything unbelievable about them having had a relationship. I’m merely saying that I have a hard time buying that the relationship between them could be so sweeping, with him having a passion for her that fuels his desire to find a cure, even after five years with no contact.

This isn’t helped by the fact that Norton and Liv Tyler have no real chemistry either. The under-baked Betty as she existed on paper would seem incompletely conceptualized even if she weren’t acting as a foil for Norton’s overwrought Banner character, seeing as so much of her role is to be observed through a gauzy lens while in the path of destruction and let her hair blow in the wind. There’s a dissonance in the way that she and Norton approach the material and that gives neither anything to play off of in their intimate scenes; if they don’t seem to be passionate about one another, it’s difficult to accept that Betty would just leave the new relationship that she’s in and take back up with Banner as soon as he reappears after such a long period of time with no interaction. It would have been a more interesting narrative choice if she and Bruce had reunited and she had moved on in the meantime, but she still loved him enough to help him seek a cure. As a plot element, this would also leave Bruce emotionally compromised in a way that paved the way for the Hulk to emerge. Instead, she completely leaves behind all of her responsibilities, including a boyfriend she seems to be living with, to go on the run with Bruce.

It’s not that Tyler’s a bad actress (necessarily), but Betty is barely a character in this movie, existing solely to motivate the two men in her life: Banner, and her father, General “Thunderbolt” Ross. William Hurt turns in a slightly hammy performance as Ross, cartoonish in the way that a lot of notable actors were when appearing in genre pictures of the Aughts before they became the new normal. His obsession with revisiting the (arguable) success of creating the Hulk demonstrates such an intense lack of foresight that he’s impossible to empathize with, when he would be better served by a more nuanced approach. Tim Roth’s character takes this even further, and his generic compulsion to become More! Powerful! makes him one of the more unmemorable villains of the genre (although he’s not as bad as what’s coming next time).

Overall, even though this is a more objectively successful film than the much-maligned Lee Hulk, it’s also a more mainstream and flat one. It does not follow as a matter of course that a film becomes more emotionally compelling or better art simply because its narrative holds together better than another. Virtually every actor in the film feels miscast, and the film as a whole doesn’t demand or reward investment, which I felt that even Iron Man managed to accomplish. Despite the fact that it leaves the door open for several ideas to recur in the MCU, like Abomination, Tim Blake Nelson’s character (i.e., the future Leader), and Betty, none of these threads has been followed up on, so I give this one a solid “skip,” unless your appetite for metropolitan destruction is still going strong after destruction porn like 2012 and Man of Steel. It’s a fine movie, it’s just not necessarily worth your time.

Lagniappe

Boomer: I understand why Banner isn’t a developer of a gamma-based weapon in most of the adaptations; not only would that make it more difficult to empathize with him, we’ve already got a weapons designer who’s hard to like in the form of Tony Stark. Still, it is weird that no adaptation of the Hulk to date has used his actual origin story, at least to my knowledge. It’s like if every non-comic incarnation of Superman had his ship landing in a farm in Nebraska instead of Kansas; it’s not different enough to elicit fanboy anger, but it is unusual. Additionally, were it not for the fact that Hurt is set to reprise his role as General Ross in Captain America: Civil War (he can be seen in the trailer), this film could be almost complete dismissed from the MCU. Abomination and the Leader actually could be interesting foes to appear down the line, but it seems unlikely that Kevin Feige and company will drag them out of the mothballs after over seven years. The weirdest thing is that Betty has been virtually excised from the MCU as a whole, what with her never reappearing, Banner being recast, and Age of Ultron establishing a romantic relationship between Banner and Black Widow. I’m not really all that sad to see her go (sorry Liv, but I’m Team Jennifer Connelly for life), but it is worth remarking upon. As Civil War does look like it’s set to address the way in which costumed heroes/vigilantes are responsible for mass destruction, it’ll be interesting to see if Abomination’s path of destruction in New York will be referenced (it hasn’t been at all in either Daredevil or Jessica Jones), especially given that the responsibility for that damage falls on General Ross more than anyone else.

Brandon: Ugh, America’s favorite D-bag billionaire Tony Stark drops by in The Incredible Hulk‘s final scene to promise a crossover that ain’t coming for four more features. I’m hoping at some point I’ll warm up to MCU’s interplay between its individual properties, but so far it doesn’t amount to much more than Downey’s Stark or Sam Jackson’s Nick Fury ominously hinting at future payoffs in films where they don’t belong. Surely, there’s a way to incorporate these characters in each other’s universes besides arbitrary cameos with no in-the-moment narrative consequence, but I’m just not seeing it yet.

Combined S.W.A.M.P.F.L.I.X. Rating for The Incredible Hulk (2008)

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twohalfstar

-Agents of S.W.A.M.P.F.L.I.X.

Agents of S.W.A.M.P.F.L.I.X.: Iron Man (2008) & The Rise of the MCU

/ swampflix / 25 Comments

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Superhero Watching: Alternating Marvel Perspectives, Fresh and Longterm, Ignoring X-Men, or S.W.A.M.P.F.L.I.X., is a feature in which Boomer (who reads superhero comics & is well versed in the MCU) & Brandon (who reads alternative comics & has thus far seen less than 25% of the MCU’s output) revisit the films that make up the Marvel Cinematic Universe from the perspective of someone who knows what they’re talking about & someone who doesn’t have the slightest clue.

Boomer: It’s hard to believe now, but there was a time when superhero films were considered box office poison, and Marvel wasn’t even thinking about producing live­action adaptations of its material for the big screen. I won’t get into all the gritty details of the rise and fall of the House of Ideas here, but suffice it to say that political machinations behind the scenes and creative differences abounded, meaning that one of the most recognizable brands in the world nearly went bankrupt many, many times. If you’re looking to take the equivalent of a capstone class in the history of Marvel Comics, I recommend a viewing of Chuck Sonnenberg’s “Rise and Fall of the Comic Empire” video series on his website SFDebris, which offers a fair and concise outlining of Marvel’s corporate shenanigans and infighting over the past four decades, and that series still clocks in at thirteen segments ranging from ten to thirty minutes in length. I’ll try to be more succinct here.

Considering that Marvel consistently has the creative edge over the more staid DC Comics, it’s ironic that DC is usually the first to enter new realms of media. DC put two live action television series on air (the Adam West Batman in the 1960s and Wonder Woman in the 1970s) before Marvel ever got a TV show off the ground, and they beat Marvel to theatres by two solid decades (not counting the Republic Pictures Captain America serials of the 1940s and George Lucas’s 1986 Howard the Duck, which is best forgotten). Richard Donner’s Superman took the world by storm in 1978 and was followed by three sequels and an attempted spinoff. As a result of the increasingly diminished returns on the Superman film series, the general public largely fell out of love with film adaptations of comics, before the genre was briefly reinvigorated in 1989 following the success of Tim Burton’s Batman and that film’s first sequel. That franchise also devolved into garbage, with the DC’s box office domination effectively being murdered in 1997 by the dual death blows of the notoriously terrible Batman & Robin and the stunningly unimaginative Shaquille O’Neill vehicle Steel. Finally, it was Marvel’s turn.

Although the X-­Men were unquestionably Marvel’s most lucrative property in the eighties and nineties, and many people would credit the success of the X-­Men film series (alongside Sam Raimi’s Spider­-Man films) as creating the modern zeitgeist of superhero saturation, bringing Beast, Storm, and Nightcrawler to life in a film was considered prohibitively expensive at the time. The real catalyst for this revolution was the surprising success of 1998’s Blade (budgeted at $45 million but earning over $131 million worldwide). Blade proved that superhero movies didn’t necessarily have to be created by committee to appeal to a wide audience, and that a comic book adaptation could be financially successful even if it eliminated the merchandising potential of toy sales (which tied the hands of the creative teams involved; in order to prevent watchdog and advocacy groups from causing a stink about inappropriateness of toys, films had to be made not only safe for children, but to appeal to them as well). Blade was an R-­rated movie that brought in tons of new fans for Marvel, and kick­started the company’s interest in features. The problem was that, to save itself from going under following the Comic Speculator Bust of the Nineties, Marvel had sold off the film rights to its most noteworthy properties in order to get funding to keep the lights on and the presses printing. Japanese film company Toei produced a (notably ridiculous) live action Spider­Man series in the 1970s, and the character was the most popular Marvel property in that country; as a result, his film rights ended up in the hands of Sony. Twentieth Century Fox ended up with the rights to the X-­Men, the Fantastic Four, and Daredevil. Marvel pictures were making money, but the comic company itself was still struggling.

This diaspora of character rights didn’t leave Marvel many characters or franchises to choose from, and the company made the logically sound but ultimately detrimental choice to make its first foray into film production with Marvel icon The Incredible Hulk. The television series based on the character had run for five successful seasons in the seventies and the gamma­-irradiated antihero had long been a mascot for Marvel as an instantly recognizable figure and a representative of Marvel’s introspective approach to storytelling in contrast to DC’s implacable supermen; investing in a film adaptation seemed obvious. Unfortunately, Ang Lee’s 2003 film Hulk was a mess, and it would take years before Marvel started co-­producing films in a meaningful way again. With the further failures of forgettable fare like 2004’s The Punisher and 2007’s Ghost Rider, it became apparent that a new approach was needed.

Kevin Feige was a Marvel exec who actually cared about the stories and characters, and he came up with a plan of creating a movie franchise that would function in much the same ways as the books did, allowing characters to cross over, team up, and occasionally come to blows. Since Hulk had been such a disaster, the newly founded Marvel Studios (with Feige at the helm) decided to move forward with an adaptation of Iron Man first, hitching the fledgling production company’s wagon to Robert Downey Jr.’s unpredictable star. And the rest, as they say, is history. In the seven years since that film’s release, the studio has moved from co­-producing features with Paramount to releasing directly through Disney (Marvel’s decades of questionable solvency having ended with the decision to allow the media demigod to buy them out) and churned out two “phases” of films, with Phase II having concluded with Ant­-Man, which was my first review for this site. With Phase III set to take off in a few months with the release of Captain America: Civil War, and with Brandon’s Russ Meyer project and my Dario Argento project winding down, we’ve decided to go through all twelve official Marvel Cinematic Universe films in order and review them, from the perspective of an old hand (me) and a newcomer (him). We’re calling it Agents of S.W.A.M.P.F.L.I.X..

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threehalfstar

Boomer: I’ll be as upfront about this as I possibly can: I never really cared much for Iron Man as a character. I didn’t dislike him, I simply remained utterly apathetic to him for most of my life. Of all the Marvel cartoons that aired during the nineties, his was the most forgettable and (to my memory) the most cheaply animated. On the Marvel side of the comic aisle, I loved the X­-Men most of all, but I also liked the titular Thor beginning with J. Michael Straczynski’s run, the recently popular (and I love it) Jessica Jones, and Captain America, who represented, to me at least, the purest ideals of true ethical and upright citizenship. Then, in 2006, along came Marvel’s Civil War crossover event, which pitted Steve “Captain America” Rogers against Tony “Iron Man” Stark. To keep it simple, the narrative of Civil War was instigated by a deadly event that led Iron Man and Cap to fall on opposite sides of a political issue, the Superhuman Registration Act; the SRA would be a government mandate requiring all superpowered individuals (which in the comics is a huge but socially vulnerable minority) to reveal themselves to the government and be registered (and basically submit to the superhero version of the selective service, if the selective service had a 100% drafting rate, but I digress). Marvel’s editorial mandate was that Iron Man’s weirdly conservative Pro­Registration side be depicted as being “right,” with Cap’s more individualistic and liberal Anti­Reg side being shortsighted and “wrong.” This was despite the fact that a proposed Mutant Registration Act had been a topic of plots in the X-­Men comics for literally decades, with such a missive being treated (and rightfully so) as a gross civil rights violation. (The trailer for Captain America: Civil War that was released last week seems to show that the film version will have a more balanced approach.) I won’t discuss how that comic arc played out for fear of potentially spoiling the viewing experience for Brandon, but I will say that I found Iron Man’s choices to be unconscionable and eventually came to hate Tony Stark the way that the blogosphere hates Gwyneth Paltrow. Of course, I was super pissed a year later when I read a copy of Wizard Magazine and learned that a character responsible for so much that I hated would be the face of Marvel’s new cinematic initiative.

I still watched it, though. Eventually.

I saw the first fifteen minutes or so of the film while hooked up to a centrifuge at a plasma “donation” center, literally selling part of my blood for an extra $40 a week because I suffered from the distinct but common misfortune of coming of age in Bush’s America and the accompanying recession. The center had a small collection of DVDs they would play in the donor area to pass the time, and someone must have rented Iron Man since it was screened only once (as opposed to the dozens of times I watched their copy of Miss Congeniality, a movie I can recite backwards and forwards, much to my own embarrassment). I have to admit, Iron Man didn’t leave much of an impression on me at the time, but after nearly a decade to get over my sophomoric and hormone­-addled (if well­-founded and still totally justified) feelings about Civil War, I found this viewing to be much more enjoyable, even if it errs on the side of disbelief a bit too often.

By the way, has this review seemed a little overly political to you? That’s intentional. Iron Man is a strange movie in the way that it is paradoxically both steeped in and independent of the politics of 2008, especially with regards to the othered “foreign” antagonists. White businessman Obadiah Stane and his vaguely country accent have a clear narrative arc: Stane likes money, and he wants to keep making money, and if he has to play both sides to keep raking in the dough, he has no moral or ethical qualms about doing so. The motivations of the vaguely Middle Eastern group (who are obviously modeled after Al Qaeda but have an English language group name and live in an unnamed desert country) are never explained and implicitly irrelevant. The script takes great pains to dance around the word “terrorist” when discussing the Ten Rings, instead opting for “warlord,” but it clearly utilizes visual rhetorical strategies to evoke that image. But to what end? Why are they rounding people up? Is Stane complicit in an ethnic genocide? A bloody border dispute? The film expects you not to think too hard about it, or anything else, for that matter, especially not matters of narrative convenience.

For instance, Stane confronts the leader of the terrori—I mean, the Ten Rings, and obtains the suit Tony built “in a cave(!) with a box of scraps(!)”; in the next, Pepper visits Tony and he asks her to go to Stark Industries and steal files using his magic flash drive; in the very next scene, Pepper finds plans for a finalized Iron Monger suit on the desktop before Stane walks in. Everything that happens off-­screen happens instantly. It’s so ridiculous that it would be insulting if the film didn’t make up for its inadequacies by being so much fun. The intermix of horror tropes that seem to come out of nowhere (in the scene of Tony’s escape at the end of Act I, and when Pepper is startled by Stane in the Monger suit, for instance) somehow don’t feel tonally inconsistent, and there are scenes that are, frankly, exhilarating; in fact, I think the fighter jet set piece is probably one of the best sequences that Marvel has done to date, and easily out-paces the finale. A lot of that fun comes from the tightness and polish to the script, which reads like an exemplary if basic lesson in successful planting­-and­-payoff, with regards to things like high-­altitude freezing points, magic nuclear pacemakers, and the sonic paralyzer (I have no idea if that device has an actual name). It’s easy to go along for the ride if you can accept it for what it is: a comic book movie.

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onehalfstar­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­

Brandon: Full disclosure: A large part of the reason I’ve been avoiding catching up with the dozen or so MCU movies & TV shows I haven’t bothered with is my distaste for Robert Downey Jr.’s Iron Man. The four hours I’ve spent with the character in the two Avengers films has been more than I would’ve ever asked for. He just hits this annoying little anti-hero sweet spot that always gets on my nerves: the “lovable” jerk. The philosophical opposite of characters like Kenny Powers & BoJack Horseman, who ruin everything they touch, the lovable jerk is a character you’re supposed to celebrate for their asshole tendencies. If you want a concrete example just look to just about any character Vince Vaughn has played since Old School. Or, better yet, look to Tony Stark, a womanizing drunk whose reformed bad boy act is never quite as convincing as his grotesquely egotistical beginnings.

I’m admitting to all of this prejudice early because it was highly unlikely that I was ever going to be able to get on Jon Favreau’s Iron Man‘s wavelength. As soon as the dad rock licks of AC/DC play Tony Stark into the frame so he can crack smarmy, chauvinistic jokes in the back of a limousine in the film’s opening scene my worst fears about Iron Man were confirmed  & the next two hours left me with the distinct feeling of taking my medicine so that I can enjoy better MCU titles down the line. Everything from the stewardess-banging to the US-Iraq War context to the throwaway transphobic joke in the airplane hangar to Stark’s horrific Guy Fieri sunglasses & facial hair combo were huge turn-offs for me. By the time our hero suffers the irony of being attacked with the very weapons he pushed as an arms dealer & gets the liberal bug, all of a sudden super stoked about renewable energy sources instead of getting laid, it registers as too little too late. Too much of the film reads as a being-a-rich-dick fantasy fulfillment for me to focus on anything else.

Speaking of which, I’ve  been so wrapped up in ranting about Iron Man’s Lifestyles of the Rich & Douchey aspects that I forgot to mention that it’s also a superhero movie. The few elements of Iron Man I appreciated were distinctly non-Tony Stark related. Jeff Bridges was deliciously evil & barely recognizable in his role as the film’s Big Bad, who was giving off an unignorable daddy bear vibe (especially in a bedtime Skype session). Gwenyth Paltrow had a gloriously uncomfortable surgery scene that has inspired a new fetish in me: chest-fisting. I also liked a good deal of the film’s gadgetry, especially J.A.R.V.I.S. the sassy robot, the car battery heart Stark carries around like a lunch box, and the crude Iron Man suit prototype he builds in a terrorist cave to take advantage of the gullibility of his unintelligent brown people captors (ugh). And, you know, there’s always plenty of mindles surface pleasures to be found in watching two dudes in mech suits fighting it out. By the end of the film, even the flying-through-the-air superhero antics were exhausting to me, though, especially in the relentless suiting up montages & the empty spectacle of the climactic battle.

I’m promising myself & anyone else who’s interested that I’ll be more open-minded about future MCU outings, especially since the select few I’ve already seen (the two Avengers films, Ant-Man, and Guardians of the Galaxy) were all very enjoyable, Tony Stark content notwithstanding. I just couldn’t commit to what Iron Man was selling me & I expect that it’ll probably stand as one of my least favorite entries in the MCU franchise. I also suspect that it’s probably a crowd favorite among George W Bush & his supporters, since it feels distinctly tied to the tail end of their era of American thinking.

Lagniappe

Boomer: As to where Iron Man fits into the rest of the MCU, I have to say it’s a pretty good place to launch, and it was probably a smart decision to focus the first Marvel pic on an entirely human character whose gimmick is combining wealth and mechanical genius, rather than going straight for the Norse gods, sentient robots, and super soldiers. Regarding plots left to unfold, I think the fact that this film was only responsible for sowing a few seeds of the larger universe contributed to the movie’s more laid­back feeling. As someone who spent his childhood obsessing over Star Trek and his adolescence reading comics and Kurt Vonnegut books, I’m used to the idea of maintaining an elaborate, intersectional fictional universe in my head; I don’t generally think too much about accessibility, but, looking back, Iron Man is refreshing in its simplicity in this regard. S.H.I.E.L.D. is present throughout but only tangentially, with the first appearances of fan favorite Phil Coulson and Nick Fury’s post­-credits scene comprising the organization’s entire role in the plot. It actually made me a little nostalgic for the early days of the MCU, when things were less complicated and not all villainy had to link back to Hydra somehow. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Brandon: When I was watching Jessica Jones last month I found nearly every element of the series enjoyable except for its gestures to tie itself into the MCU at large. Fans already tuned into the MCU were likely tickled by offhand references to the Hulk & the loose ends of Luke Cage’s storyline, but I found they were mostly wasted efforts, weakening some of the the series’ strengths as a self-contained property. Iron Man’s Nick Fury & S.H.I.E.L.D. nods work sort of in the same way. I get the feeling that the MCU’s formula is going to play out the same way as pro wrestling or soap operas or, hell, comic books: always promising to deliver on the next spectacle instead of focusing all efforts on the task at hand. I’m not entirely opposed to letting the story arcs build toward a larger goal, but as a moviegoer unfamiliar with the comic book source material, it can be a little frustrating to not know where this whole thing is going or if it even has a final destination to begin with.

Combined S.W.A.M.P.F.L.I.X. Rating for Iron Man (2008)

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twohalfstar

-Agents of S.W.A.M.P.F.L.I.X.