My daughter and I are in the middle of rewatching via the chronological approach and it's been great so far. It also makes it easier to track where the different infinity stones at any given time.

Does Captain America chronologically belong in 1942 or when he wakes up which would be right before The Avengers?

Saw someone argue that the 1942 stuff is kinda a flashback.

YouBet said:

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Brian Earl Spilner said:

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Thanks for posting this. I think I'll start a marathon, starting with Iron Man 3, which I haven't seen since it released in theaters. Wonder if I'll enjoy it more this time around.

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Huh? Why start with that?

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Earlier in the quaratine, I watched Thor 1-2. And Iron Man and Avengers, I've seen countless times.

As for Cap 1, Iron Man 2, and Incredible Hulk, I just don't like those very much and they are pretty skippable imo.

bagger05 said:

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Does Captain America chronologically belong in 1942 or when he wakes up which would be right before The Avengers?

Saw someone argue that the 1942 stuff is kinda a flashback.

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As someone in the middle of the chronological order viewing I say it goes perfectly first. You get to see the tesseract show up and follow its path to Captain Marvel which is the second one to watch. Also nice that Captain Marvel is second because you get it out of the way.

The one downside to chronological is the credits scenes don't always align. The Captain Marvel mid credits scene only works after infinity war. No big deal for a rewatch but a consideration if someone is watching for the first time.

ETA - I also think it's cool to get different exposure to the Kree and Skrulls early on in Captain Marvel.

Bruce Almighty said:

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I love the first half of The First Avenger, but find the second half fairly generic. I also don't like Red Skull.

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This is me exactly

I feel like Red Skull kind of got the shaft in the MCU. He's supposed to be a generational enemy for Captain America, but he kind of just gets dispatched in First Avenger. Obviously, for the sake of getting to the Avengers, we get Cap frozen until modern times and Hydra reappearing kind of filling that void, but I think it would have been cool for one of those Hydra agents reveal themselves as a new Red Skull alias during Winter Soldier.

I mentioned it in another thread, but it's always a problem with superhero movies where you often have these major villains summarily dispatched by the end to provide a closed book on a single movie, which results in something of a villain of the week feeling with what should be long term foes. I really hope when they introduce the FF, Doom isn't treated like this, or Magneto with X-men. They definitely need to be given the Loki treatment.

MuckRaker96 said:

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The more complex the villain, the more I want of them. But if they are a one-trick pony, it's hard to be excited when they're the bad guy in another movie

. My biggest problem with Age of Ultron is that we were still dealing with the tessaract/Loki's scepter as the "villain", and Tony, and Bruce as his enabler, make the exact same mistake that they were lambasting Nick Fury for in the first movie - trying to control something that they had no real clue how it actually worked or what it could do.

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My biggest problem with the movie was that the "Age of Ultron" literally lasted two days.

Honestly, my biggest problem with AoU is the creation of Vision. What are we supposed to take from that scene?

Recap:
Tony and Bruce use the scepter and accidentally create Ultron. Everyone blames Tony. Then they get the mind stone and Ultron's perfect form and Tony does it again. Cap tries to stop him, a fight breaks out, and then Thor powers Vision and says there's something bigger going on than any of them know.

So Tony doubles down, but this time he's right because the mind stone is important? Is that it? And it's not until Civil War that we see Tony regret his actions?

Weird stuff. Thematically, I don't know what to do with it.

So at the end of IM3, Tony Stark destroys all his suits and seems to, for the moment, give up being Iron Man.

Is it ever explained how/why he's back to regular ol' Iron Man in Age of Ultron?

I honestly can't remember if they even acknowledge that.

I'm glad someone else didn't quite understand all of the mental hurdles being thrown around in AoU. I'm admittedly not as big of a fan boy and many of the MCU super fans, but that one was tough for me to wrap my brain around when I first saw it.

I haven't seen it in years, but from what I recall, Tony believes that adding in Jarvis' personality would make the new creation not evil like the first one.

MuckRaker96 said:

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I try not to think about Iron Man 3 at all, except for Rebecca Hall.

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It's completely inconsequential as a movie, because nothing that happens in the movie has any repercussions in the rest of the MCU whatsoever.

We see Tony have anxiety attacks about NY and about being Iron Man in general. That's pretty much the only real change he goes through in the movie, when he implements the Clean Slate protocol and destroys all his suits. For all intents and purposes, he gives up being Iron Man.

And by AoU, he's back to being IM with no explanation given, or even an acknowledgment of his supposed transformation in IM3.

I suppose that's more on AoU than IM3 though.

I just rewatched it last night, and while not terrible, I'm still firmly in the "meh" camp on that movie.

(Not that Ultron is much better, though.)

Brian Earl Spilner said:

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I haven't seen it in years, but from what I recall, Tony believes that adding in Jarvis' personality would make the new creation not evil like the first one.

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Ah. You're right. That's very unsatisfying, but that's what it is. Because Tony's VI was arbitrarily powerful enough to stifle the AI created by the Mind Stone.

Man. That's convenient.

Brian Earl Spilner said:

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MuckRaker96 said:

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I try not to think about Iron Man 3 at all, except for Rebecca Hall.

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It's completely inconsequential as a movie, because nothing that happens in the movie has any repercussions in the rest of the MCU whatsoever.

We see Tony have anxiety attacks about NY and about being Iron Man in general. That's pretty much the only real change he goes through in the movie, when he implements the Clean Slate protocol and destroys all his suits. For all intents and purposes, he gives up being Iron Man.

And by AoU, he's back to being IM with no explanation given, or even an acknowledgment of his supposed transformation in IM3.

I suppose that's more on AoU than IM3 though.

I just rewatched it last night, and while not terrible, I'm still firmly in the "meh" camp on that movie.

(Not that Ultron is much better, though.)

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Movie is definitely meh. I was hoping the introduction of AIM would go beyond IM3, but that has yet to materialize in any meaningful way.

I liked Iron Man 3, Ultron is bottom tier of the MCU.

i don't know how i got my own bracket, but thanks.

that was actually harder than picking favorite MCU movies.

i will be honest and say that "..and I am... Iron Man" and dancing with Peggy will always be my top two. it's recency bias along with emotion playing in, but those were the two most impactful to me.

I have a feeling AIM will return. Not only were they AIM in name only, but they're going to be villains in the upcoming video game, and we know Marcus and McFeely had been trying to write MODOK into a movie for ages. They almost had the people in the yellow suits in an Ant-Man and the Wasp flashback as well.

Soon...

I always thought Iron Man 3 and the "clean slate protocol" was more about Tony giving up his paranoia and resolving his PTSD, not giving up being Iron Man. It's actually about becoming okay with being Iron Man.

He wanted to be everywhere at once, but he can't. He also doesn't really want to go through what he did in the Avengers again. He's terrified of that, but he also feels responsibility as the only person who can save the world. So he did the next best thing and had an army of copies of himself to patrol the world and be everywhere at once so he doesn't have to. Through the events of Iron Man 3, he lets go of that fear and blows up all his copies, resolving to save the world with the Avengers as Iron Man instead of being scarred that he has to do everything alone.

I think it's interesting from that standpoint that it's also the last of his solo movies. By the time he comes out of the third installment, he's part of a team and not a solo guy. I think he even takes that to extremes trying to be the ultimate "team player" with the socovia accords/civil war story line. He's gone from being the guy in IM2 yelling at congress that they can't have his tech to telling the Avengers that they "need to be checked".

I'm a sucker for the final battle in IM3. I liked all of the different versions showing up, Tony talking to all of them, telling them who to help, etc. It was goofy, but fun explosion theater.

That army of copies would've come in real handy in Endgame.

Makes me wonder, if Tony was controlling a suit, and the suit put on the glove, could he have snapped?

In Ultron, he's really not better, either. He's still trying to figure out a way to stop things before they happen. That goes all the way through Endgame with the "we're the Avengers, not the preVengers" speech and talking about how he wanted to "put a suit of armor" around the world. He's the ultimate control freak.

My fav scene of all the movies is still the elevator scene in Winter Soldier

Brian Earl Spilner said:

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That army of copies would've come in real handy in Endgame.

Makes me wonder, if Tony was controlling a suit, and the suit put on the glove, could he have snapped?

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Why couldn't he say "Hey, kill all the bad guys, but also don't let this radiation kill me?"

Or once he did the snap, what happens to the Infinity gauntlet on his arm? Couldn't someone else reverse time and bring him back to life while Thanos still died? When Thanos reversed time in Infinity War, it only seemed to affect the immediate area - Scarlet Witch and Vision - not anyone else.

Sorry for the delay in the LOTR Tournament. As I was finalizing entries Thursday night I became aware that Horn of Ban Hammer had been sounded on my account ONE LAST TIME.

Staff, not a big fan of creativity with anagrams it seems, even when the post was 7 days old.

Anyway, taking the kiddos to the water park today. Will get it rolling tomorrow.

MuckRaker96 said:

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I try not to think about Iron Man 3 at all, except for Rebecca Hall.

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This may be a controversial opinion, but I really liked the Mandarin reveal. I was a big comic fan back in the 80's and 90's and was excited to see this classic Iron Man villain in a movie. When the reveal came, I thought it was pretty ballsy and may not have been on board had it not been for Ben Kingsley's hilarious performance. He made that whole plotline enjoyable.

Oh, and IM3 also had that spectacular mid-air rescue:



...this should have made the Best Scene bracket...

Brian Earl Spilner said:

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That army of copies would've come in real handy in Endgame.

Makes me wonder, if Tony was controlling a suit, and the suit put on the glove, could he have snapped?

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Shades of the "Is the elevator worthy" conversation from AoU.