Thor: Ragnarok (2017)

Original Review: The Hammer of the Gods (four stars)

I’ve got a bone to pick with this movie, so let’s figure this out together. Here are the facts: Hulk took off in a Quinjet after helping defeat Ultron. Fury thinks that Quinjet crashed in the Banda Sea, but can’t be sure. Regardless, Hulk’s not around for Civil War. The next time the mean, green killing machine shows up, it’s in Thor: Ragnarok, where he says (yeah, he talks now) that he crashed his Quinjet on the alien world of Sakaar. So that’s weird, how did a thoughtless brute take a terrestrial aircraft across the universe?

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Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017)

Original Review: n/a

Hey, Beyonce put out a thing called Homecoming today, isn’t that a fun coincidence.

Spider-Man is Sony’s biggest movie franchise and they don’t mess around with it. Before Sam Raimi walked away from the series, the studio was planning so far ahead it had started hiring people to work on the fifth and sixth sequels to that original run. When that all fell apart, they still had a reboot, The Amazing Spider-Man, five years after Spider-Man 3. Before the reboot’s sequel flopped, Sony was said to be working on a massive list of spin-offs and sequels, apparently desperate to make a shared universe similar to the MCU. Even in the aftermath of that critical misfire, Sony had Tom Holland cast and in an MCU movie just a year after coming to an agreement with Disney. Spider-Man: Homecoming actually came out a year earlier than Sony was originally planning The Amazing Spider-Man 3 to be released.

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Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 (2017)

Original Review: “Your Eyes Could Steal a Sailor from the Sea” (four stars)

I’m 99% positive I’ve written this before (and if I haven’t, I’m sure it comes through in my writing), but the media I love the most are the ones that put me in worlds I want to be in with characters I want to spend time with. That is a big part of why the MCU resonates so well with me, serialization breeds investment by making worlds more complex and characters deeper. I’m aware that’s not enough for some people, who expect when they go to the cinema to see something new, inspiring, or provocative. Critically, where I’m interested most in character, others would put a greater emphasis on storytelling, or originality, or craftsmanship (I especially ignore this one, rarely thinking to write about the technical side of film). Every once in a while, though, you get something truly sublime. Something at the nexus of all taste, something new, and moving, and built on continuity. Something so profound it instantly becomes an iconic part of the culture. Something like a talking raccoon tearing up as spaceships set off colorful fireworks to Cat Stevens’ “Father and Son.”

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Doctor Strange (2016)

Original Review: Strange Magic (three and a half stars)

Michael Giacchino is an award-winning composer whose work you’d probably recognize. He scored a bunch of Pixar movies like The Incredibles and Up, the latter of which won him an Academy Award. He’s also worked on a lot of J.J. Abrams projects, from his shows, like Alias and Lost, to Mission: Impossible III and Super 8. Dude’s good, is what I’m saying. In 2016, Giacchino was brought in to create a new fanfare for the Marvel Studios logo and to score his first MCU movie, Doctor Strange. He rose to the challenge, creating a sweeping theme for the sorcerer supreme. The only problem? It’s strongly evocative of his Star Trek theme from seven years earlier. Like the movie itself, that theme is great on its own but underwhelming in its greater context.

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Captain America: Civil War (2016)

Original Review: The War of Bucky Aggression (five stars)

Captain America: Civil War is the beginning of a shift in focus for the MCU away from common people. A division subtly starts to erupt between “enhanced individuals” and everyone else, so subtle I didn’t really notice it until Infinity War. It makes sense as a natural progression of the shared universe; the more supers there are, the harder it gets to justify screentime for normies. We are about eight years in at this point, the days of SHIELD keeping everything quiet in Phase One and the “you’re that guy from the thing in New York” obfuscations of Phase Two are over. Black Widow released everything SHIELD and Hydra had onto the Internet and Ultron scooped up a city and blew it up. It’s a super hero’s world, everybody else is just living in it.

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Ant-Man (2015)

Original Review: The Smallest Man on Earth (three stars)

I have mixed feelings about this movie, but I think I’m going to rate it higher this time. Where to start? My problem with Ant-Man is that I don’t get his gimmick. He shrinks to the size of an ant and can also control ants, that all makes sense. But also he gets like super speed and strength when he’s shrunk down? When Hope starts training Scott in this movie she explains, “when you’re small, energy’s compressed. So you have the force of a 200 pound man behind a fist a hundredth of an inch wide. You’re like a bullet. You punch too hard, you kill someone. Too soft, it’s a love tap.” Sure enough, later we see Scott zipping around rooms knocking out professional soldiers with a single hit. But it bothers me that it never feels intuitively correct.

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