Original Review: Avengers Assembled (four and a half stars)

In their “The Marvel Symphonic Universe” video essay, Every Frame a Painting explains how movies in the MCU tend to play it safe (and to an extent, obvious) with their scores. While this approach has plenty of upsides, it does have the major problem of making the music forgettable. I don’t totally agree with them – I would argue Captain America and The Avengers both have great themes – but I think they were right that phase one of the MCU was such a gamble in and of itself that Marvel avoided risk where they could. This issue goes deeper than the scores, and it’s the reason why seven years later I still can’t give The Avengers, probably my favorite MCU movie, the full five stars… Also star ratings are bullshit.

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Original Review: n/a

Thor was the last MCU movie shot on film, and you can tell. I mean, yes, the jokes about how Kenneth Branagh seems to think comic books = Dutch angles are funny, but this is a great-looking film. The opening scene, in which Anthony Hopkins’ Odin recounts Midgard and Asgard’s war with Jotunheim, is basically the super hero version of the opening of Peter Jackson’s The Fellowship of the Ring. It is some stunning, epic stuff! Which is probably why I get the impression some folks didn’t realize that Thor is a comedy.

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Original Review: Heart of Iron (three and a half stars)

Robert Downey, Jr. fully realized his big comeback in 2008. Not only was Iron Man a massive hit, with a sequel almost immediately greenlit, but just a few months later he delivered an Academy Award-nominated performance (in blackface) in Tropic Thunder. He followed that up in MCU-less 2009 with another massive win, Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes. It seemed like he couldn’t stop winning, especially since in 2010 he would be teaming up with one of the biggest comedy stars of the time, Zach Galifianakis to make a buddy road film called Due Date and bringing in the hotly anticipated Iron Man 2.

And then there was Mickey Rourke. Like Downey, 2008 was a banner year for this troubled actor, who gave probably the best performance of the year in The Wrestler. But Rourke never shook his reputation for being a bit off-putting and couldn’t find a good direction to pivot his redemption in, making super forgettable action flicks like Killshot and 13 as well as whatever the hell The Informers was. 2010 was stretching the limits of his good vibes, but he had to sure-fire hits to keep him going: Iron Man 2 The Expendables. Whoops.

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Original Review: Doing the Monster Smash (unrated)

I think it’s funny that at the end of John’s Incredible Hulk review he wrote, “this kind of flick is truly what I look forward to with the summer season” because I ended my Iron Man review a month earlier with basically the same sentence: “Iron Man is one of those great summer escapist movies.” I think that speaks to the low expectations we still had for super hero movies back in 2008 (and our own writing). The Incredible Hulk is most certainly summer fair, but it is far from being a great escapist experience.

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Next month’s Avengers: Endgame will bring a close to the third phase of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) and quite possibly be the last we see of a group of iconic characters. I’ve come to love the MCU quite dearly, and its existence pretty much exactly lines up with that of this blog, so I thought I’d take a chance to reevaluate these movies as well as my own writing, starting with my review of Captain Marvel and going through all the other films in chronological order every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. That’s 11 years and 21 moves to get through in just over a month, so let’s not delay!

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