Movie Review: Captain America: The First Avenger

Captain America: The First Avenger (2011)

I've never cared too much for Captain America before the MCU, and that's probably the most polite way that I could put it. He's a guy that runs around in a flag, and as a non-American, whenever he shows up in the comics he's tolerable at best. I know of him from old Spider-Man comics or whatever, but unlike many other superheroes that I was aware of prior to 2011, I really did not care for the star-spangled man with a plan. 

Until, of course, the Marvel Cinematic Universe. I don't think Captain America became a favourite of mine overnight because of this movie, no -- it'd be a combination of The Avengers, Winter Soldier and Civil War and at some point I realized that I really, really actually do like Chris Evans' very earnest portrayal of Captain Steve Rogers. And honestly, they do tread the line very, very well with the writing of MCU Cap in order to make him still represent the values of U.S.A. but still be accessible enough as a generic 'freedom and justice' hero that isn't tied to a specific nation. But I'm not really here to discuss the concept of the character himself, I'm here to discuss the movie.

And it's a pretty good movie! At this point, everyone was really looking forward to The Avengers, and this movie having the subtitle of The First Avenger really is trying to cement the fact that, yes, this movie is going to tie together Iron Man and Thor (and, okay, Incredible Hulk a bit) and lead everything to the big crossover movie in 2012. And a lot of stuff are less one-line hints and turned into huge monologues. The plot device, the Tesseract, is explicitly noted by the Red Skull as being a powerful Asgardian artifact. Tony Stark's dad Howard is a major supporting character, and the rest of Steve's war buddies would go on to establish SHIELD. The final scene is even Steve Rogers waking up after spending time as a popsicle in the year of 2012, under the ministrations of Nick Fury. 

And just like the original Thor and Iron Man... they do kind of play it safe with this one, basically going through a lot of the main parts of Steve Rogers' backstory. Everything is done very well, though which is pretty important, I feel, and a lot of the scenes in this movie would end up informing Steve Rogers' character development all throughout the MCU, which is pretty neat. The plot starts in the '40's, with the Marvel Cinematic Universe's fantastic version of World War II. And we get introduced to our good buddy Steve Rogers (Chris Evans), a sickly, asthmatic spindly young man who wants to go and fight in the front lines because he just wants to help people. And all around him, his far more buff and soldier-boy-type best friend Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan) kind of tell him that it's all right and that there are other ways to help out... but Steve is determined to do his part in the war, leading to his chance encounter with Abraham Erskine (Stanley Tucci), an eccentric German scientist that's part of the SSR -- Strategic Scientific Reserve -- who's recruiting young men for a super soldier program. 

And I really do like that the two huge qualities that Steve Rogers has and is emphasized is his huge heart and desire to help others (that scene where he jumps on a dud grenade probably emphasizes why he is the best choice there) and actually using his brain at times (the flag scene). Eventually, under the eyes of Erskine, British agent Peggy Carter (Hayley Atwell) and Colonel Phillips (Tommy Lee Jones), Steve Rogers basically proves himself to be the most mentally and emotionally stable. A lot of this honestly boils down to the acting, and Evans interacts very, very well with Atwell and Tucci that makes me actually get invested in the character. Also, his sheer pluckiness. "I can do this all day" and all that. There's honestly not too much to say here, but there are a lot of actually neat moments between Rogers and his supportive cast. Mostly Bucky, Peggy and Erskine. 

Ultimately, Steve gets shoved into a machine and gets injected with a combination of a super-soldier serum and some Vita Rays. Oh, and Howard Stark (Dominic Cooper) is there too! Howard is pretty fun in this movie, although he isn't as huge a presence as I expected him to be. Steve Rogers gains powerful muscles, just in time to fight the Hydra assassin who infiltrated the demonstration. He's too late to save Dr. Erskine, but after a pretty cool scene where he displays what a super-soldier is all about, Rogers rips out the Hydra assassin out of a fancy submarine and does some neat blocking with a trash-can lid. 

While all of this is going on, the movie cuts away now and then to the main villain. Johann Schmidt (Hugo Weaving), a.k.a. the Red Skull, leader of Hydra, a sub-sect within the Nazis. Schmidt is obsessed with gaining powerful artifacts, and the one we're dealing with in this movie is a glowing blue cube called the Tesseract, an energy source that was once the artifact of Asgard. Schmidt is noted to be the result of an earlier super-soldier program, but one that resulted in physical deformities and implied mental instability. Oh, and the nebbish Arnim Zola (Toby Jones) plays off as the more entertaining, panicky sidekick to Schmidt's more badass vibe. Schmidt's ultimate plan is... global domination or something. He betrays the Nazis, and his master plan would involve attacking all the major cities in the world simultaneously. Or something. 

And... and the second act of the movie is a bit slow, but Steve Rogers is basically paraded around as 'Captain America', a colourful costume to get war bonds or some stuff, since all the higher-ups don't really put too much stock in just a single super-soldier. In a tour where he performs on the front lines, Rogers finds out that his best buddy Bucky is MIA against a Hydra base, and with the aid of Peggy Carter and Howard Stark, we get Captain America essentially launching a solo operation to single-handedly free hundreds of soldiers and wipe out an entire Hydra base. He rescues Bucky, a whole lot of other soldiers who would become his Howling Commandos (Dum Dum Dugan and the others are basically glorified cameos, though) and gets a face-to-face with Red Skull. 

The dynamic between the two... they're rivals. Throughout the movie, that's basically about it -- Red Skull gets a couple of monologues about superiority and stuff. Hugo Weaving is fun as he chews the scenery, but otherwise Red Skull is kind of a run-the-mill comic-book villain. He's better than Abomination or Whiplash or Malekith, but he only really fits this movie's themes insomuch that Captain America is fighting an evil version of himself that stands against all the values he stands for. 

We then get a montage of Captain America and his Howling Commanders doing World War II stuff, and... and it's neat. Howard Stark makes a shield out of the super-rare and super-durable metal Vibranium. And... and it's mostly a bunch of neat good moments to show the passage of time and just how much Captain America becomes an icon in this version of history. And also to give some time for the budding romance between Rogers and Peggy to grow. And compared to the rest of its Phase I counterparts, theirs might be the one I feel like it worked the most? After the montage, we get the second act's action scene, where a raid on a train leads to the apparent death of Bucky and the capture of Arnim Zola. Bucky's death drives Rogers into a bit of a despairing moment (though it honestly doesn't last for too long) while Zola's capture leads to the plot-related stuff to set up the final battle. 

The final battle is pretty neat, though also slightly too long. Rogers manages to get on the massive Hydra aircraft, prevent the launch of the (actually kinda cute) weird helicopter-mini-ships and fight Red Skull for a bit. During the fight, the Tesseract falls out of its container, and when the Red Skull handles it while monologuing, he gets atomized and seemingly sent into space. However, the plane itself still carries a lot of bombs, and in an act of sacrifice, Steve Rogers crash-lands the plane in the Arctic, entombing himself and the plane in ice for 70 years. What makes this scene work very, very well, again, is the Peggy/Steve romance that actually feels pretty well-done. The fact that Steve is willing to sacrifice everything, even his happy life and his 'dance' with Peggy, that ultimately he's still the guy that would jump on the grenade to protect the people around him... that is actually a pretty well-done story arc. 

And then, of course, the final scene of the movie shows Cap being defrosted, still preserved in the same age, and finding himself waking up in the year 2011/2012-ish, with the war he's fought over for seventy years but then gets roped into the Avengers program by Nick Fury almost immediately. 

I honestly had a hard time writing this review, mostly because I really didn't have much to say about it. This movie is just... it's just solid! It's not the best, but it's definitely not bad at all. Red Skull provides a pretty decent villain that isn't bad, but not too impressive. The broad strokes of Captain America's backstory and how it needs to tie into the storyline we have for the Avengers is laid out pretty well. All the characters (except for the rather underutilized Howling Commandos) all get their chance to shine. I very much appreciate a lot of the smaller moments that Steve Rogers has that humanizes him and keeps reminding us that he's a hero even before he gets the super-steroids, something that gets built up upon a lot in subsequent movies, and easily my favourite part about the character. 

This movie is pretty solid, even if they kind of know that it's mostly serving as a backdrop and an origin story for the good Captain. It's really not my favourite part of the MCU without being actually bad, but some of the best movies -- like Captain America: Winter Soldier and The Avengers are explicitly sequels that wouldn't make as much sense without watching this one. So yeah, overall a very solid movie. 

Marvel Easter Eggs Corner:

• Post Credits Scene: It's just the Avengers trailer! Keep in mind just how huge it was at the time.
  
• Stan the Man: Stan Lee is a confused general who expected 'Captain America' to be taller.
• Future Movies Foreshadowing: Nothing, really? Everything is basically pretty much laid out or are major plot devices. 
• Past Movie Continuity: The Stark Expo from the first two Iron Man movies is seen in all its glory. Red Skull monologues about Yggdrasil and how the Tesseract is the crown jewel of Odin's treasure room, and retrieves the Tesseract from the town of Tønsberg, briefly seen in Thor's prologue scenes as a town where Asgardians visited in the past. 
• Movie Superhero Codenames:
• Played with? "Captain America" is more of a stage name when he's used as a propaganda tool, and he's otherwise called by his actual name. 'Cap' gets tossed around a lot, though. 
• Johann Schmidt is ever only called by his real name, and his codename, 'Red Skull', is only spoken once by a Nazi officer who uses it as an insult.
• Favourite Action Scene: Less of a single action scene, but probably the train battle. The original fight against the Hydra assassin is all right, too. 
• Funniest Line: "I've knocked out Adolf Hitler about 200 times." 
• Obviously, the whole 'star spangled man with a plan' is a riff on the actual WWII propaganda comics, and punching Hitler, well, you could see the very first cover of the very first Captain America has that. 
• Arnim Zola is first seen from the POV of a magnifying glass. In the comics, Arnim Zola is famous for walking around in a robot body that has a screen with his face on it.

Movie Review: Thor

Thor (2011)

Unlike many of the other MCU movies, I've never actually rewatched Thor! I missed it on theatres and watched it once on a long airplane flight back in late 2011, around the time that the world was hyped for the upcoming... either Captain America or the Avengers, one of the two. I was familiar with Nordic myths because I was a massive geek as a child, and I know that he shows up as a character in the Marvel comics because I played Marvel: Ultimate Alliance... but other than that, I wasn't very much aware of the character until the MCU came along. 

...and I really didn't remember much of this movie. I know the plot, of course, and I remembered really liking Loki and finding Darcy to be funny, but otherwise I really don't have much of a memory of this movie. The broad strokes have basically been adapted into many other Marvel-related projects like cartoons and video games that were released to tie in with the MCU, so this specific movie sort of got tossed in the wayside as Thor's appearances in the Avengers, or his two sequel movies became the bigger topic of discussion. 

And... and Thor is not the best MCU movie out there. It's not aged the best, although I will still acknowledge that it's a very, very solid superhero movie. It's just that the movie itself really flip-flops on the story and the focus it wants to tell, and I do feel like it hurts the pacing of the movie. And I think the worst part might be the first act? We start off with the human cast (Jane Foster, Erik Selvig and Darcy Lewis) investigating thunderstorms and stuff, and then human-mode Thor falls out of the clearly unnatural weather phenomenon... and then we cut back to 'several days ago' for around thirty minutes or so as the audience gets to see Thor run around in Asgard and Jotunheim as the proud prince. And then we get the forty minutes or so of Thor bumbling around Earth as a fish out of water without his powers. And THEN he gets his power back, we get a climax against the Destroyer on Earth, and then a second climax against Loki and his plot on Asgard. 

And I do get it. I do get the necessity of Thor running around on Earth. It's part of the mythos of the comic-book superhero's origin story, that his time on Earth ends up teaching him not only humility, but to respect us mortals. And considering the other superhero movies that were released at this point are primarily all more... sci-fi oriented (Blade notwithstanding), I also can't fault the filmmakers for wanting to ground the fantastic gods on Earth. 

It's just that... it's pretty clear that the bulk of the work of the scriptwriting and worldbuilding surrounds the Asgard cast. And it's not just Thor (Chris Hemsworth), Loki (Tom Hiddleston) and Odin (Anthony Hopkins) either... I really felt like even the side-characters like Heimdall, Sif, the Warriors Three and Laufey had a lot more thought put into them. In contrast, despite their large screentime and pretty charming acting, Jane Foster (Natalie Portman), Erik Selvig (Stellan Skarsgard) and Darcy (Kat Dennings) really do feel like they're kind of there out of a sense of obligation more than anything. And it's not to knock the actors, of course -- Darcy is probably still my favourite side character in the entirety of MCU's Phase One, and while they're not the most memorable, both Jane and Selvig were fun. Hemsworth also makes for a pretty fun 'fish out of water' god-prince stranded on Earth. 

It's just that... it's just that the Earth scenes really didn't feel all that interesting, and ends up feeling like a long stopgap. There was that one scene that I really liked when Thor reaches Mjolnir in the middle of the SHIELD compound and fails to lift it, but otherwise it really does feel like we're just waiting until Thor gets his shit together and realizes he's been duped by Loki. There is, I suppose, the narrative point of his romance with Jane, but other than a brief talk about Yggdrasil and Bifrost and whatnot in the stars, I really didn't quite get that it worked out as well as the writers probably intended it to be. 

Thor also has to deal with the unenviable task of not just debuting the Asgardians (which, I remind you, are magic-wielding Norse gods) to an audience more used to Batman and Iron Man, but also to more... cosmic-flavoured artifacts. It doesn't get too bad since all the Earth people saw are just Thor himself and the Destroyer armour (which is kinda-sorta tech-y), but on the other side of things we get to see the Bifrost bridge, the Casket of Eternal Winters and a whole lot of other things. Early MCU gets lambasted a lot by comic-book critics for being so skittish about acknowledging that, yes, magic exists... but on the other hand, I actually see the merit of slowly easing the audience over a couple of movies before really hammering it home in Doctor Strange later. 

Now, on the other hand, the introduction of everything else? That, I can get behind. It's a bit clunky and exposition-heavy at times, but honestly, I appreciated the Asgard-related scenes so much. Maybe it's because the hammy scenery-chewing that the Asgardian actors do really nail just how these larger-than-life characters should act... but I also really feel like the story and relationships between these characters work so well. And sure, the primary trio is the dysfunctional family of Odin, Thor and Loki... but little moments like Loki trying to impress Frigga when he 'gallantly' rescues Odin from Laufey; or Fandral being the first to pick out Loki's deception; or the argument that Fandral and Volstagg has when he is gorging himself on food; or the mutual respect between Thor and Sif... and frankly, everything about Heimdall.

And simply having brief flashbacks to events in the past, like how the Asgardians and Midgardians fought against the Jotuns in the past, or Thor coming dangerously close to fucking up the truce between the realms during his showboating in the first act... Asgard truly feels like a world that the director and actors fleshed out pretty well, and while I'm not trying to diss the Earth actors, it's just that neither the story or the characters there are compelling, especially when we have this game of kings and gods going around on the other side of the world. 

The plot itself is basically just the origin story of Thor, and Chris Hemsworth portrays the proud, violent prince in the beginning of the movie well, and contrasting him to the still-hammy but a lot more humble and heroic character at the end of the movie... it works. Granted, the character growth is perhaps not shown entirely organically, but even if he just becomes heroic just as a desire to protect others... it works. Ultimately he chooses the path of sacrifice, destroying the Bifrost Bridge and sacrificing his chance to meet Jane in order to stop Loki's mad plan to blow up Jotunheim, essentially maturing not just into a good king or a good superhero, but a good person in general. 

On the other hand, Loki? Loki was so much fun. A good chunk of how much fun Loki is stems from Tom Hiddleston's amazing performance. But even if you could already guess that the character adapted from the Nordic God of Trickery/Mischief is the real primary antagonist of the movie, I really do love just how much work Hiddleston puts in the subtle expressions he shows when he was just part of Thor's groupie. How many winces and subtle half-scowls he has when Thor undermines his 'silver tongue' in favour for Me Thunder God Hammer Smash. Loki being the unfavourite sibling is such an interesting storyline, and when we toss in the fact that he has only discovered his true heritage as an adopted frost giant in this movie? All of the jealousy boils up. And what he does in this movie is evil and heinous, no doubt (especially the climax, when he basically tries to genocide an entire realm/planet)... but seeing how little respect the dude gets, you can't help but feel sorry for Loki. 

His plan isn't all that complex, either -- leave Thor wallowing in self-grief and pity after Odin himself exiled him to Earth (he only sends the Destroyer after Heimdall and the quartet went around his back) and then set himself up as the heroic prince who saved Odin from being slain in his sleep by the frost giants who somehow slipped into Asgard. It's a plan wrapped in a desire for approval, but also entirely based around Loki's own deceit. I do like this. I do like that what Loki desires is approval of the Asgardians, the people who adopted him, because he clearly doesn't give two shits about his original heritage, killing his biological father cold-bloodedly and turning the Bifrost magic to genocide Jotunheim. 

Anthony Hopkins as Odin was also very great. It shows up a bit more in Dark World, but I really do like the sheer gravitas that Odin has in the MCU, with the slight undertone that sometimes he wavers between being the uber-wise god-king of Asgard and just a grumpy old man who's just a bit too set in his ways. His performance is great, and you really get the feeling that he loves both of his sons while also sometimes letting his emotions get in the way -- the rage against Thor's 'stupid, cruel son' and perhaps some inner, un-admitted favouritism against Loki. We don't truly get any resolution either way, but I feel like it's pretty well-executed nonetheless. 

The rest of the cast is great as well. Heimdall (Idris Elba) perhaps gets the biggest chance to shine, not just because of his plot-heavy role as the guardian of the Bifrost Bridge, but also from his very badass showcase of lawful-but-not-stupid ways that he subverts Loki's authority and gets Sif and the Warriors Three to aid Thor. Sif, Fandral, Volstagg and Hogun... they really don't get to do much other than be Thor's groupies. It's mostly just Sif that gets the most screentime and interactions with Thor and Loki, but at the very least Fandral (as the roguish one) and Volstagg (as the big dude) get a fair bit to showcase what their characters are all about. 

We've talked a bit about Jane, Selvig and Darcy up above... and again, they basically fill in some roles that the story needs. Jane is the love interest and also the 'believer' in the weird things that happen in the movie. Selvig is the older, saner and more cynical friend. Darcy is the funny one. None of them are portrayed terribly, but, again, the Earth scenes and the Asgard/Jotunheim scenes really do feel like they're vying for screen presence and I'm sorry, a bunch of storm-chasing scientists worried about their research being confiscated really doesn't feel anywhere as compelling as the God of Mischief's plans to take over the realm eternal. 

Agent Coulson from the Iron Man movies show up in a relatively major role, accompanied by fellow agent Jasper Sitwell, who's basically a more sarcastic Coulson. Hawkeye shows up in this movie, too, for all of twenty seconds as an agent with a bow that almost gets to shoot 'Donald Blake' in the neck. I kind of think that maybe there's a version of this movie that would just show 'Thor' interacting with the humans and agents and we're not entirely sure if he is just a madman or actually a Norse god, and the audience would learn alongside Jane and Coulson and the rest of the human cast that Thor is actually the god of thunder. They did something similar to this in Ultimate Marvel, I think, as well as (nowhere as successfully) in the first season of Iron Fist... but that's not what we got. Which... I don't know. At least that version of storytelling would make the long Earth scenes a lot more plausible? 

The action scenes in this one is pretty serviceable. Being a pretty early movie in the MCU we really don't have a huge budget for an action scene very fifteen minutes, but the two big setpieces -- Thor and friends rampaging in Jotunheim; and the Destroyer fight on Earth -- are done pretty well. Just like the sound effects of Iron Man's repulsors, they did a very great job at adapting the sounds and visuals of Thor spinning around his hammer or recalling it back to his hand. And while it's a bit more 'sci-fi-ized',  I really do actually like the shape of the Bifrost Bridge in the MCU, too, with the crystals and whatnot. 

Overall? Honestly, I may have been a bit too harsh on the review of this movie. It's not perfect, not by any shot, but it's a pretty solid origin story for everyone's favourite charming God of Thunder. We've got around twenty of these MCU movies to pick with, but while this has been overshadowed by many other movies, it's still a pretty solid one. 

Marvel Easter Eggs Corner:

• Post Credits Scene: Erik Selvig gets taken to a SHIELD facility to be recruited by Nick Fury, who has the Tesseract. But turns out that Loki is shadowing him! Basically foreshadowing for The Avengers. 
  
• Stan the Man: Stan Lee is one of the truck drivers that tries to drag Mjolnir, but his truck bed got absolutely fucked by the effort.
• Future Movies Foreshadowing: The Tesseract shows up in the post-credits scene, of course. 
• Past Movie Continuity: Selvig mentions that SHIELD 'disappeared' a pioneer in Gamma radiation, most likely referring to Bruce Banner. Coulson and Sitwell briefly consider that the Destroyer is "one of Stark's".
• Movie Superhero Codenames: Considering that everyone in the Thor side of the Marvel universe doesn't actually use codenames... yeah. Hawkeye just gets referred to as 'Barton' for his short scene, though. 
• Favourite Action Scene: None of the scenes in this movie is super memorable, but the one that pops to mind is Thor and his buddies rampaging in Jotunheim. Mostly for that tracking shot of Mjolnir, as well as the Frost Beast chase as the camera swoops up and down the massive ice floe. 
• Funniest Line: A bit of a meme now, but "I like this drink -smashes glass- ANOTHER!" is funny. The pet shop scene and basically every line out of Darcy's mouth are pretty great, too. 
• Thor's human alter ego, Dr. Donald Blake, MD, is used as a disguise in the middle portion of the movie, handwaved as being Jane Foster's ex. 
• In addition to the Casket of Infinite Winters, Asgard's little trophy room also contains other artifacts from the comics, among them (as the Wiki tells me) the Warlock's Eye, the Life Tablet, the Orb of Agamotto, and, most famously, the Infinity Gauntlet. Which raises some questions on whether this easter egg is going to be relevant when Thanos actually becomes the big driving force for the franchise. 

Movie Review: Iron Man 2

Iron Man 2 (2010)

This is a movie that I keep going back to and flip-flopping on how much I like it. It most certainly one of the weaker MCU movies, and a lot less solid than its predecessor, but it's actually nowhere as messy as I remembered it to be. The problem with this movie, I think, is that it tries to do too many things at the same time, and we haven't quite gotten the whole 'pacing' thing down yet. 

I guess I will get the biggest criticism out of the way first -- easily the weakest part of this movie is the poor villain. Ivan Vanko (Michael Rourke) is noted to have a lot of scenes written and filmed, but basically all of them got cut out and removed from the movie and he gets turned into Russian-villains-speak-funny for the entire movie. And... and I'll admit, Rourke's performance is hilarious in a lot of his deliveries. "Software shit." "I want my bird." "Make salute." But... but the movie's first scenes opens up with Ivan Vanko in grief as he witnesses his drunkard father Anton die. Ivan's whole motivation throughout the movie is that he views Tony's father Howard Stark as an ungrateful bastard who deported Anton back to Russia and stole the credit for the arc reactor's design as his sole creation. And the awesome speech about how he "made God bleed" by showing to the world that the invincible Iron Man is vulnerable in public? Hell, even the team-up as the more dangerous subordinate recruited by the toothless businessman villain Justin Hammer is an interesting dynamic! But all of this honestly leads to a pretty awesome build-up... that really goes nowhere.

After the prison breakout he basically hangs out in Hammer's factories making the Hammeroid drones and essentially undermining Justin Hammer's authority, then he basically becomes a generic final villain in the Stark Expo that has to be stopped because he blows stuff up. Honestly, even his final defeat felt like a huge anticlimax to me. And the sad thing is that we really could've gotten a lot out of Whiplash that ties into Tony's own arc in the movie if only it was incorporated better. The themes of vulnerability and legacy runs pretty strong in this movie, and both Tony and Ivan is driven heavily by what their fathers had (or hadn't) done, and we could've had something out of it. But instead Tony's character arc basically goes off independently as he barely gets any interaction with his antagonist... who, from Tony's point of view, is just 'that guy that attacked him in the racetrack once' and 'that guy who's hijacking the robots'. Compared to all of Tony's other antagonists in the MCU, he and Ivan have very little in terms of confrontation, which is ironic because with Ivan's backstory he's probably the one with the most interesting reason to go after Tony. 

...that said, how badass is that race-track scene? I still remember Whiplash very, very fondly for that scene alone. 

Another plot thread that I felt didn't have an adequate payoff is James Rhodes. Rhodey -- recasted as Don Cheadle in this movie for the rest of the MCU -- is extremely charismatic and easily one of the best supporting characters in the entire franchise. And, like Ivan Vanko, he also gets a very great first half of the movie! This builds up on what we've seen with Rhodey in the first movie; that Rhodey is Tony Stark's under-appreciated and long-suffering friend who keeps sticking his neck out to help Tony because of his friendship and his position, but he ends up seeing that Tony, well... he's not the most responsible or appreciative. There's a nice storyline that goes on here about how he genuinely cares about Tony, but since Tony keeps pushing him and Pepper out of the way because of his alcoholism and other problems, Rhodey snaps. And you can't really blame him with the sorry sight that Tony is in during the party, making a fool out of himself and quite literally pissing his super-expensive Iron Man suit in front of a gaggle of vapid guests. Ultimately, Rhodey steals the Mark II armour from the first movie, fights Tony a bit, before handing it over to the U.S. military.

And this, again, leads to a pretty interesting setup... that goes nowhere. By the time of the climax, Tony worked his own problems out with minimal input from Rhodey (beyond the proverbial slap in the face when Rhodey stole his armour). Everything goes on well as Iron Man and War Machine both act as genuinely badass superheroes... and while it isn't as terrible or abrupt as Ivan Vanko, beyond them making it up through the events of in-battle banter, Tony and Rhodey just... sort of shrugged off their conflict. It's something that I feel is realistic for these two characters, admittedly, especially with their very strong BFF-bros vibe, but I really did feel like we could've gotten something more. 

And... and that said, this movie still has a pretty solid plot. Mostly for Tony Stark himself and building up all the secondary characters for The Avengers (which is a smart thing to do). It's just that it's kind of choppily edited and Whiplash's story, as noted above, isn't the best at carrying the story itself. Tony Stark himself is introduced basically 'privatizing world peace' with his armour, publicly stopping many crimes, bamboozling a bunch of government senators' attempts to take the Iron Man armour, and making huge showcases as he sets up a modern-day Stark Expo. 

But Tony Stark is hiding the fact that his arc reactor's palladium core is slowly degrading and poisoning him, and he's got limited time. This is his main problem throughout this movie, a stand-in for the iconic alcoholism he has in the comics, as Tony basically goes increasingly reckless and depressed about his impending death but refusing to show weakness in front of anybody. After all, every huge gesture he does -- like appointing Pepper as CEO out of the blue, or the impulsive bit in Monaco where he rides a F-1 car -- could be seen as him just 'oh hey another waaaacky Tony Stark thing!' Most importantly -- and something that actually gets subtly followed up in multiple Avengers movies in the future -- he doesn't tell anyone he's dying and he keeps everything bottled up inside and refuses to confide to anyone. Not his best friend Rhodes, and not his girlfriend Pepper.

Life punches Tony in the gut, though, because, well, during the Grand Prix, Ivan Vanko shows up with his own perfected arc reactor and nearly kills Stark publicly if Happy and Pepper hadn't driven in and tossed him the Mark V suitcase armour. Tony won that battle, but his vulnerability is made apparent not just to the world, but even more heavily to Stark himself. He gets really drunk in his final birthday party, and embarrasses himself which leads to the Tony/Rhodey confrontation. 

As he continues lashing out and hanging out inside of a giant donut, he ends up meeting with a bunch of SHIELD agents. Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson), Director of SHIELD shows up to give Tony some tough love, coupled with Agent Coulson (Clark Gregg) from the first movie and Natasha "Black Widow" Romanoff (Scarlet Johansson), who had spent the first half of the movie infiltrating Stark Industries as she worms her way into being Stark's new secretary, something that's pretty fun because we all like Black Widow... but also honestly ends up being a redundant plot other than introducing us to Natasha a bit early. 

And... and in the second act of the movie we basically have Tony Stark force himself to look back at his clouded memories of Howard. Sure, Howard might actually be a negligent and hard father, but the videos that Tony sees shows that he's not as invincible or as perfect as Tony makes him out to be. It's a nice moment of nice admitted vulnerability on Howard's part, and I think Tony realizes that deep down he doesn't have to pretend to be unbeatable and invincible all the time. From a more serious plotline stuff, we get some technobabble mumbo-jumbo as Howard helps Tony create a new element that will fix the poisoning, that Howard basically figured out the first steps of and Tony ends up finishing. Robert Downey Jr is a fun actor and his performance is always fun, but while I did enjoy this sequence I do have to admit that it's easily the weak part of the movie.

Oh, and it's at this point in the movie that Howard off-handedly notes Anton Vanko's actual crimes, which... is never touched up in Tony's confrontation with Ivan, and it's not relevant to anything that really happens in this movie other than to make the audience feel less bad when Ivan gets killed at the end? I guess? I don't know. It's just so much wasted potential here. 

That's basically, I guess, the crux of Tony's storyline here. He makes peace, however messily, with his obsession with his dad's legacy and leaving one behind for his own, and he admits to Pepper later on that he will confide in her more. We get a long, extended action scene of Iron Man and War Machine fighting against the small army of Vanko-controlled Hammeroids in the Stark Expo, which is always cool because seeing robots fight each other is basically the best action movie experience ever. Snuck into this whole thing is a sub-plot of Happy driving Natasha Romanoff to Hammer Industries, where she gets a badass scene beating up all the Hammer guards, before deactivating the control of the War Machine armour. Natasha's pretty cool in the scenes we get to see of her, but it's clear, honestly, that like most of the characters in the movie, she's treated as an action set-piece first and a character second. It's a bit more all right for Black Widow to not have a huge storyline beyond just being a badass SHIELD agent, though. 

Let's go over the secondary characters I haven't touched upon a bit quickly, yeah? Justin Hammer (Sam Rockwell) is another very memorable part of the movie. Hammer tries to set himself up as the new Tony Stark, trying to model himself off of Stark and pretend that he's this suave businessman that swaggers around and can rule the room. Except he's kind of a dorky loser, and while the plan to fake Ivan Vanko's death and have him stick around to make armours for him is actually not a bad one, it's pretty clear early on in their relationship that Ivan's the threat here. Hammer gives us some of the best moments of comedy at his expense, and I actually did like how he's portrayed in this movie. 

Pepper... Pepper gets to do a bit more in this movie, though she honestly gets lost with how many plot points and characters that run around here. She gets to become the new CEO of Stark Industries, she gets involved more readily in the mid-movie action scenes and the final climax (she essentially arrests Hammer) and we get that fun little mutual respect thing with secretary!Natasha and the pretty well-acted bit where Tony not-confides in her... but ultimately she's just kind of there. Again, the performance is pretty well-done and she gets a couple of neat individual scenes, but she's just kind of there.

Other supporting characters in this movie include a bigger role on Happy Hogan's (Jon Favreau) part, though it mostly amounts to comedy. Him being shown up twice by Black Widow in the movie is fun, and he gets to totally run down Whiplash in the racetrack. Nick Fury is pretty damn cool in his limited screentime, and while I certainly wished that we could've gotten more Fury; Fury's (and, by extension, Black Widow's and Coulson's) relatively limited and standalone screentimes in this movie as the good government spy agency is done succinctly enough. They have enough of a presence in the movie to lead to the Avengers-foreshadowing scenes at the end, but they didn't become a massive distracting plot tumour from the whole Palladium/Hammer/Vanko storyline. 

And... honestly, there's a lot here that could be improved, I think, and the sequel movies are apparently the ones that get hit with the biggest examples of executive meddling. Still, if nothing else, this movie is pretty fun to watch because while the storytelling and pacing isn't the best, the action scenes and the comedy works pretty well. And even then, it also builds up these characters for subsequent movies, which is a always a nice consolation prize for most of these MCU movies. Not the best movie, but not the worst either. 

Marvel Easter Eggs Corner:

• Post Credits Scene: Phil Coulson drives up to see Thor's hammer Mjolnir on the ground, while a crowd of people gathers around it. 
  
• Stan the Man: Stan Lee shows up as Larry King in one of Tony's parties. 
• Future Movies Foreshadowing: In addition to more references to the Avengers' Initiative, we also get Fury and Coulson talking about something in the South-West region (where Thor takes place). Also, Captain America's shield shows up as Tony is making his new element, though as a gag he uses it just as a prop. It's hard to see, but the notebook of Howard Stark contains notes on the Tesseract. The map of metahuman activity shows markers in Africa and the ocean, foreshadowing Black Panther and most likely a little nod to Namor. 
• A bit of a cheat because it most certainly isn't planned out when this movie was filmed, but the little kid in the Iron Man mask has been basically retconned into being a young Peter Parker.
• Movie Superhero Codenames: Rhodes is referred to by his military rank the entire movie,  though we do get a 'you wanna be the war machine?' line from Tony. I don't think 'Black Widow' or 'Whiplash' are said at any time in the movie. 
• Favourite Action Scene: A tough one to choose, but I'll have to say Iron Man and War Machine's badass back-to-back pose in that Japanese garden against an army of Hammeroids. Whiplash in the racetrack is a very close contender, though. 
• Funniest Line: Less of a line and more of a scene; but Happy spending five minutes to dirty-box a single security guard down while Black Widow effortlessly super-spy kung-fu's two entire corridors and off-handedly pepper-spraying the last one.
• The storyline here has shades of the iconic 'Demon in a Bottle' arc from the comics, with shades of 'Armor Wars'. 
• During the final conversation between Stark and Fury, a monitor talks about a crisis on the Culver University, which takes place in The Incredible Hulk's mid-way point. Since Stark accepts his job as SHIELD's consultant here, this leads into Stark's appearance at the final scene of that movie.
• Happy Hogan rescuing Tony Stark at a crashed car race is how the two characters met each other in the comics.
• Tony keeping his armour in an attache case is how he carries his suit in some of the earliest issues of Iron Man comics. 
• Anton Vanko (Ivan's dad) is the name of the Iron Man nemesis Crimson Dynamo. Whiplash is basically an amalgamation of Crimson Dynamo and Blacklash.
• Ivan's fake ID tag at the race track pegs him as 'Boris Turgenov', the name of the second Crimson Dynamo.
• Hammer calls the War Machine armour a 'variable threat response battlesuit', the original designation of the War Machine armour in the comics. 

One Piece 1007-1009 Review: The Not-Return of Kozuki Oden

One Piece, Chapters 1007-1009

We take a brief break from your regularly scheduled MCU movie reviews to talk about One Piece.

It seems like forever since I last talked about One Piece! There was a break between chapters and so I ended up starting to reread the manga! And watch the anime a bit! If you haven't checked it out, I reviewed the early filler arcs of One Piece, while at the same time watching the Wano arc. Man the animation glow-up after a decade and a half is pretty damn awesome, huh? How great is the Wano arc in the anime, really? I had attempted to watch the anime back when the Dressrosa arc concluded and didn't quite care to really continue and only watched the huge action highlights, and the same feeling happened during the Whole Cake Island arc. But Wano? With its fancy artstyle and the utterly over-the-top zoom-ins during action scenes? Also, one of the bigger complaints I had with the earlier parts of the Wano arc in the manga get explained in that the massive dump of so many characters at once is a lot more easy for the audience in the anime; and having the action scenes like the Hawkins fight or the Page One fight actually shown to us beyond two pages is certainly something I approve of.

Anyway, the three newest chapters! I really don't have as much to say about them, although as I understand it apparently the fandom was foaming at the mouth at the end of chapter 1007 due to the cliffhanger? It's what's so fun about reading manga weekly, really -- it's seeing each and every cliffhanger drive people crazy. Man, wonder how the speculation game was back in the early days of the internet during something like, say, Marineford or Sabaody?

Chapter 1007: Mr. Tanuki

The big cliffhanger that Hyogoro is probably going to die in 1006, for one, is a cliffhanger that I really didn't believe -- for the simple fact that, well, this was basically already set up to be Chopper's big moment, that he's going to be able to make a cure for the disease that is ravaging his allies. If Chopper makes the cure but loses one of the major secondary characters in the process? It really would feel like a pretty terrible gut-punch, right? So of course 1007 ends up with Chopper eventually coming up with the Chopper-Phage Nebulizer; a giant chemical bomb that has the shape of Chopper's face. That's cute! It does take around half a chapter to reach there, and we get a pretty cool speech about how Chopper uses a 'good' virus to counteract the 'bad' virus. I'm not sure how topical Oda planned the whole ice oni virus out to be, but... okay, sure! That's honestly about how I expected it to be, although they sure really dragged this out for half the chapter. 

Queen, meanwhile, does something kind of stupid and just rants about how stupid and worthless and useless everyone there is,  and how the only thing they can do is to die for the cause since the Smilers and Waiters are essentially dead weight. In the grand scheme of things having a bunch of fodder characters really isn't going to turn the tide in any meaningful way, I don't think, but it's still a nice moment where the samurais and random Beast Pirate goons' faith in the pirate-doctor got rewarded.

And then Chopper goes into monster point and just slaps that fuck out of Queen. Hell yeah, Chopper! It's a pretty awesome partial two-page spread, with the glorious angry "I'm not a raccoon dog!" yelling from Chopper, who has been mistaken for a tanuki for damn near a decade by everyone. And I love the little set of panels of everyone raising their hands to their mouth going "oh... sorry" in their minds. And this includes not just Hyogoro and the random goons, but also Marco and Drake. Fun!

This chapter ends with three seemingly unrelated scenes. Momonosuke transforming to a dragon while lamenting his cowardice (which leads into 1008); CP-0 talking about the 'failure' of cloning Kaidou's still-unnamed fruit via his DNA bloodline element; and the Scabbards waking up to see Kozuki Oden alive. 

So yeah, there's probably something about the fruit that Momonosuke consumed that's going to be really relevant in fighting Kaidou, I think! And the Oden cliffhanger... well, obviously since we're covering the next two chapters we all know who 'Oden' actually is, so let's jump into the next one.

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Chapter 1008: Atayama Thieves Brigade, Ashura Doji

And turns out that "Oden" is just a painting made by Kanjurou. And only Ashura Doji and Raizou actually realize that this isn't really Oden. And... not that I actually believed that this is ever going to be Oden alive and well, but I am glad we went with the most sensible option here. Many other theories that abound include Onimaru (that's a fair point, whatever happened to that little fox?), a ghost (all right), some sort of time-delayed hologram message but with a fantasy layer, Catarina Devon, or them seeing Yamato or Hiyori as Oden because of some will-of-Oden stuff.

But no, it's just Kanjurou, using a painting of Oden to get under everyone's guard and to twist the knife in a bit more. Honestly, after that amazing death scene in the flashback, having Oden back alive would undermine that entire chunk of the manga, some ten to fifteen chapters and the whole message of 'my death is something I accept if my will is carried by others' that Oden's story hammers into us. Narratively, Oden's story is complete, unlike Kanjurou and Orochi who return in this chapter. 

So yeah. It doesn't keep Kin'emon and the rest from believing that it is Oden, though... and Ashura Doji is the one that charges in and proves that this Oden is a painting. Ashura Doji is, I think, the least interesting and the least developed of the Scabbards, but his one big scene in Act 2 was showing off that massive graveyard of all the people who couldn't wait for 20 years and had gone off to fight Kaidou on their own. So of course he's going to be a lot more cynical and realistic about things, accepting that they have lost their master.

The fake Oden is carrying a bunch of dynamite under his kimono. Ashura Doji charges Kanjurou and they blow up outside of the building. We don't see a body, and this chapter alone shows two characters coming back after ambiguous deaths, so I suspect we'll get a Pell situation out of Ashura Doji. If we're going to kill off one of the Scabbards, though, Ashura Doji is probably the one you can write off without being too sad. 

It also deals with another aspect of this arc that I wasn't the biggest fan of -- Kanjurou's seeming death. Kanjurou was dealt with basically off-screen. We see the beginnings of the confrontation and then we cut to Kiku with a bloodstained katana over Kanjurou's dead corpse. Thematically and in a meta sense it is a karmic death for a stage actor like Kanjurou to die off-screen... and that's the only reason I can kind of believe that. But from a narrative writing standpoint, Kanjurou not only has been a long-time supporting character since Dressrosa nearly four years ago, but he really didn't get a satisfying narrative payoff. So yeah, bring it on, and Kanjurou being a pretty huge jackass and mocking everyone is certainly something I like in a villain. 

Kanjurou goes off to murder Momonosuke, and the surviving eight Scabbards go off to hunt him down. Jack gets in their way, and Inuarashi (alone?) stay to hold him off. I love the little pissing contest between the two "No moons here, Mink." "Yeah, no poison gas here, jackass." Oh, also, honestly kind of randomly in a single panel? Orochi is alive, hanging out with his goon Fukurokuju, and he's setting fire to the castle... I really don't think Kaidou of all people is going to be bothered by you setting a bunch of rooms on fire. We get a brief Momonosuke scene again where he apparently has some sort of ultra Observation Haki? Or the Voice of All Things? Or are the two of them the same? He can tell Luffy's condition. The final page basically shows the battle on the rooftop, with Luffy going Leeroy Jenkins and getting batted around easily. The others basically try and formulate a plan to separate the two Yonko. Oh, we also get to see Kaidou's hybrid form and it's... it's basically what we kind of expect? It's a lot cooler in 1009 when we see it in action and from profile shots. Nothing that blew me out of the water; it's a pretty cool form. 

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Chapter 1009: Hell

The first scene opens up with the surviving Scabbards meeting Orochi -- and one of the biggest things that made me steadfast that Orochi isn't dead is that... we never saw him really do anything with his orochi devil fruit, and why design such a fruit if you're not going to use it? Orochi transforms into his orochi form, but the Scabbards just... absolutely behead every single head. I'm not sure if this is it for him because, again, maybe it's a thing where you have to cut off all eight heads at the same time and we only have seven Scabbards here (Kin'emon, Denjiro, Kawamatsu, Nekomamushi, Raizou, Kiku, Izo). I'm not sure who would be the most impactful to get the kill on Orochi... I kind of want Hiyori to do it since the first act of Wano really builds it up... but at least the Scabbards get some catharsis out of it in this chapter.

The other Scabbards go off, but Raizou stays back to fight with Fukurokuju. I guess this is what's going on? Each Scabbard stays behind to fight off one of the warriors as they make their way to Momonosuke? We're already down Ashura Doji, Inuarashi and Raizou. I'm not sure who else is left to fight, though, unless some of the Scabbards will get in the way of the Straw-Hats-vs-Tobi-Roppo battles. 

Almost half of the chapter then cuts back to the rooftop battle, and in one of the biggest writing moves I appreciate, we get the explanation why Law doesn't just Room-Shambles the two Yonko and call it a day. Rip their hearts out, swap their limbs and attach them to rocks, or something... well, turns out that his powers can't affect people with too strong of a Haki. Is that just a limit on the Ope Ope no Mi, or is it all Devil Fruit powers that affect other people? It kind of reminds me of that scene in Bleach where Soi Fon uses Suzumebachi on Aizen and it's ineffective because of the 'gulf in reiatsu' or whatever. I'm not sure how I feel about this -- narratively of course we need it because I don't want Law to end the fight anticlimactically in two panels, but I've always found One Piece fights to be the most entertaining back in the day because it's more about the power application and less about who has more chi or whatever.

Kaidou and Big Mom do a combo blow called 'Ocean Sovereignty' that looks pretty fucking impressive... but more impressive is Zoro blocking the move. Holy shit, Zoro, this arc is good for you. Zoro is confirmed to still be alive, if quivering on the floor... and honestly, I'm pretty sure he's going to still jump into the fight anyway. Luffy continues to fight Kaidou and I really like the little shit-eating grin Luffy has when he mocks Kaidou for dodging his Red Hawk -- 'are you afraid that it'll hurt?' Of course, Kaidou goes full on berserk on Luffy for that, spitting out fire blasts from his mouth and unleashing a massive swing down of his club called Ragnarok.

But while all of this is going on, the rest of the Supernovas attack Big Mom, and they basically do what Nami, Brook and the others did near the end of the Whole Cake Island arc -- focus on the Homies. Kid creates a little shock-proof cell and Law teleports Zeus into the metal box. Zoro just slices the shit out of Prometheus over and over and over again (he can cut flame, remember?) while Killer bullies Napoleon. Big Mom herself is still pretty strong and pounds Kid into the ground, but she gets close enough for Kid to wrap her in metal and repel her away, and then Law launches a massive boulder to push her over the edge of Onigashima, with no Prometheus or Zeus to come and save her. 

...I don't think this is how Big Mom is taken out, but if it was? I don't have any complaints about it. Pretty cool scene overall, and if she gets saved by Kaidou or her children (they're still on the candy ship somewhere after Marco dropped them, right?) I wouldn't be mad either. Pretty cool, either way. 

Movie Review: The Incredible Hulk

The Incredible Hulk [2008]

Everyone kept saying this as 'the black sheep' of the MCU, but... I really don't think so. The black sheep of the MCU movies really would be Thor: The Dark World, wouldn't it? Though this movie is certainly not as fondly remembered as the others. I kind of think that it's mostly because it was made with a different tone than the others, and that tone was a bit more serious and a bit more... rigid, I guess? Which is not to say that Incredible Hulk didn't fit into the MCU list of movies, because it does. But then thanks to fallout with the actor of Bruce Banner in this movie, Edward Norton, the Hulk was recasted in the Avengers, and while mentions to the events of this movie have been mentioned here and there, and General Ross (William Hurt) has shown up in at least three other MCU movies, so the events of this movie is certainly canon. It's just that, well, we probably won't be seeing characters like the Abomination or the Leader show up anytime soon. 

Also, interestingly enough, unlike all the other MCU movies up until Spider-Man shows up in Captain America: Civil War, Hulk is one of those few superheroes who already had a movie in 2003, and back then a lot of the audience isn't quite as familiar with the term 'reboot'. Which I think this movie capitalizes on by having Hulk's actual origin story alluded to in a couple of flashbacks, and starting off immediately with Bruce Banner already on the run. 

And I think that's more or less basically the whole movie, with the audience being introduced to Bruce Banner as he's on the run, as he's trying his best to survive and find a cure to his condition. We get a couple of tantalizing flashbacks and mentions to his gamma sickness as Bruce contacts his one ally, "Mr. Blue", while in hiding in Brazil. We also learn as the movie goes on that the experiment was originally meant to rival or recreate the Super Soldier serum... nothing too concrete actually is stated here about Captain America or whatever, but I did like the little nod of continuity. Meanwhile, General Thaddeus Ross, father of Bruce's ex-girlfriend Betty Ross, is on the hunt for Bruce Banner, who he views as a threat to humanity in general.

...and, for what it's worth, I do like this way of storytelling, where we focus so much on Bruce Banner as this man who's scared of himself, but also trying to understand his condition and minimize any losses of damage and lives caused by his rage-monster alter-ego. Unfortunately, due to being chased down and attacked by Ross's special forces team, led by the particularly brutal hunter Emil Blonsky, puny little Banner is driven to the point of anger that he turns into the Hulk. 

You have to think that Ross is kind of stupid here, though, for not actually telling his soldiers just what Bruce Banner is all about, other than the fact that they need to tranquilize him before he gets angry. It's understandable from a storytelling perspective since all of this builds up to an admittedly pretty awesome and tense scene as Banner finally shows what he's so afraid of and why he keeps track of his heart rate, but kind of a silly move there, Ross. After a bit of a conversation with Blonsky which has a couple of nice themes of soldiers needing to hunt and whatnot, Blonsky gets injected with a small amount of the Super Serum. 

In the second act of the movie, Bruce's attempts to find allies ends up with him in Culver University, and ends up meeting his old girlfriend (and Ross's daughter) Betty. But thanks to Betty's suspicious boyfriend Leonard Samson (who's later actually mortified at Ross's behaviour) Bruce's presence ends up causing the arrival of Ross and Blonsky. The battle here is pretty cool, particularly since we see the Hulk in broad daylight. Sure, the CGI is a bit more gritty compared to what we're used to in future MCU movies, but it's still serviceable and since this Hulk is intended to be more monstrous and less heroic, it works. Again, everything happens as you'd expect in a Hulk movie -- Hulk protects Betty, beats up the bad guys (Blonsky disobeys orders to fight him mano-a-mano and gets trounced), and Ross is more interested in taking out the Hulk. Kudos to William Hurt, though, for actually making General Ross feel conflicted and terrified when he sees Betty almost killed in an explosion. The sonic tanks in this fight is also pretty cool. 

Bruce and Betty go on the run and we get some rather fun scenes. The attempted sex scene; Betty being angry at a taxi driver... perhaps one of the few heartwarming scenes from the Hulk other than being 'smash' and 'protect Betty' is shown here when he roars and tosses a rock into a storm because he thinks the storm is bothering Betty. Again, it's kind of a shame that we never really got a proper movie to sit down and psycho-analyze the Hulk (Banner gets a fair amount of screentime in all the movies)... though I suppose Thor: Ragnarok does that in a way.

And this segment of the movie is a bit of a drag, admittedly, Bruce and Betty arrive in New York where they meet clearly-slightly-unhinged Samuel Sterns, who, with his homemade (!) scientific equipment, manages to create an antidote to Bruce's Hulking transformations. But then Bruce discovers that Sterns has been synthesizing his blood samples, all in the name of medicine. Bruce and Sterns goes into a bit of an argument over this, with Bruce obviously wanting all the gamma-tainted blood to be destroyed. This gets interrupted by sleep darts from Ross's team, causing Bruce and Betty to be arrested. 

However, Blonsky beats up his own military buddies and forces Sterns to inject him with Banner's blood. Obviously, this turns him into the Abomination, a monstrous... well, slightly-more-brown Hulk with jagged bones jutting out of his spines and arms. Sterns gets knocked out and his house gets blown up, though the audience does see a drop of Banner's blood enter a wound on his head. Then... then the Abomination rampages through the streets of Harlem. Kudos to those three or four random soldiers in a jeep who try their god-damn best to stop the Abomination, though. 

Obviously, we need the Hulk to fight Evil Hulk, so Bruce jumps off of the helicopter and after a hilarious almost-subversion, crash-lands and turns into the Hulk. The fight between the two is... it's pretty all right. As a kid I knew I had a bit of trouble following the two when we don't get a close-up of their faces... having them both be grimy-greenish-brown in low light doesn't really help, but upon rewatching the movie recently it's nowhere as bad as I remembered it to be. It's... it's pretty neat. There's a cool bit with Hulk's thunderclap blowing away flames; Ross gets to finally toss his hat in with the good guys and shoot Abomination with his helicopter, and Hulk uses some random chains to nearly strangle Abomination until Betty talks him out of killing the defeated enemy. After a peaceful moment with Betty, Hulk jumps away from all the soldiers arriving. 

The ending of the movie shows us Hulk in a random cottage in the middle of Canada and transforms with a smirk while the 'days since an incident' counts back to zero, an ambiguous situation that seems to imply that he's had some control over Hulking out. And, of course, Tony Stark approaches Ross at a random bar to talk about a 'team'. 

And... and, well, I get it. It's not as solid as a lot of the other MCU movies. But it honestly does what a Hulk movie really needs to do -- it hits all the right buttons. Bruce Banner being a scientist, Hulk being an angry rage monster that lashes out at everything, Hulk fighting the military, Hulk protecting the people who are nice to him, Ross is a pretty interesting antagonist... I will admit that the second act between the university fight up until Blonsky turns into the Abomination is a bit slow, but it's honestly just a nitpick. And, well, Blonsky... they could've given him something more beyond 'arrogant battle-hungry lunatic', I guess, though actually having Ross as a slightly more cerebral antagonist does work. Betty still doesn't really do much, though Liv Tyler had some fun with her role.

The movie itself is honestly pretty solid -- nothing it does will really surprise you, and if you're familiar with the Hulk character it's pretty much a by-the-books adaptation. That said, sometimes to introduce an audience to a character, sometimes that's all you need, and this just-a-solid movie, I feel, does lay the groundwork for how Hulk will be received in the greater MCU movies. 

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Marvel Easter Eggs Corner:

• Post Credits Scene: Tony Stark appears to talk to General Ross about how he's 'putting a team together'. Other than a neat nod to the upcoming Avengers movie and establishing this movie as part of MCU canon, though, nothing really came of this and one of the Iron Man movies would handwave this as something that didn't really come together. 
• Stan the Man:
• Stan Lee cameos as an unfortunate random civilian who drank a soda bottle contaminated with Hulk's blood.
• Lou Ferrigno, Hulk's actor from the 70's series, gets a cameo as the guard that Bruce bribed with a pizza. 
• Future Movie Foreshadowing: The biggest one is tying in Bruce's gamma radiation experiments and most explicitly the serum that turned Blonsky into the Abomination as being a Super Soldier serum (the program was 'put on ice', get the joke there?), tying it in to the then-upcoming Captain America movie. The Super Soldier serum is attributed to one 'Dr. Reinstein', which is an alias of Abraham Erskine. SHIELD also gets name-dropped briefly as one of the databases that Sterns hacked into. A news report briefly mentions a thunderstorm in the Midwest, which is the Thor movie. 
  
• Movie Superhero Codenames:
• As with these early superhero movies, the Hulk's name is used a lot more sparingly ("it was this huge hulk!" )
• Abomination is only briefly referred to off-handedly as 'the result could be an abomination' by Sterns, but is otherwise just referred to by his real name. 
• Favourite Action Scene: Hulk vs. Sonic Tanks outside the campus.
• Funniest Line: Bruce (as he's about to hit the ground): "OH SHI-"
• While they didn't do much in this movie, mad scientist Samuel Sterns is better known to the Marvel comics fanbase as one of Hulk's arch-nemesis, the Leader. Betty's boyfriend Leonard Samson in the comics is one of Hulk's allies, codenamed Doc Samson. 
• We get a bunch of easter eggs to the old TV series, like Bruce trying to say his catchphrase "you wouldn't like me if I'm angry" and mangling it because of his bad Brazilian; the purple pants, and Hulk saying "Hulk Smash" at one point.

Movie Review: Iron Man

Iron Man (2008)

Okay, yeah, this one took me quite a fair bit to write. I had intended to do this all the way back in February, but things just kept being pushed backwards and backwards. 

Anyway, rewind back to 2008, where a single movie about Iron Man is released to the public. Where previously only Batman, Superman, X-Men, Spider-Man and the odd standalone movie or two really only made a splash in the public consciousness, Marvel Studios released a single movie. A single movie that would be the start of a massive saga. I'm pretty sure that if you somehow are reading this blog, you know who Iron Man is, and it's as likely that you've watched this movie and at least know about the Marvel Cinematic Universe. 

But the international franchise behemoth started off from a simple, solid movie. And that movie is Iron Man. Throughout this month, we'll be reviewing every single movie in the MCU.

And the plot of this movie is honestly pretty simple. It's a by-the-books origin story for a superhero, where they fall into tragedy but then gain a superpower, and then emerge stronger in order to use their newfound power to fight for the weak. That's the gist of almost all superheroes out there, and while the specifics certainly differ, that's basically what this movie is about.

What made it so special, though, is how well it's done. Sure, the visuals are pretty awesome -- the Iron Man suit looks badass, whether it be the clunky furnace-like Mark I, or the far more refurbished and now iconic Mark III, with its repulsor sounds and the three-point superhero slam and whatnot. And it's a metallic robot armour, the concept itself is just straight-up awesome. It straddles the line between the ridiculousness of these superhero powers and just being maaaaybe realistic enough that it's almost feasible on a harder sci-fi sense. 

But what really sold this movie, I think, was simply the story of Tony Stark, as played by Robert Downey Jr. And I'm not going to undersell the rest of the supporting cast, but I don't think it's hyperbole that in this movie, Downey's performance is what carried the heavy lifting. Paired with a pretty tight script and the cool giant-robot-superhero fight scenes, and suddenly it's compelling because of the story of Tony Stark. 

I'm not the biggest fan of the in medias res opening, but it kind of works, somewhat. We are introduced to Tony Stark, a huge, smarmy billionaire who inherited the defense contractor company Stark Industries. He's not like, going around kicking puppies or anything, and is clearly a charismatic man, but he's ignorant. And that, I think, is what eventually galvanized him. A child prodigy, full of charisma, and filthy rich, Tony goes around not really giving a shit about anything or anyone, and his life is full of booze, women, money, and generally being a bit of a douchebag. 

Tony ends up being abducted after a weapons demonstration by a bunch of terrorists called the Ten Rings, and gets to see first-hand the sheer horror of the unregulated weapons that his company and his family's legacy has done. While under captivity, Stark befriends what's essentially his mentor, Ho Yinsen (Shaun Toub), and while he is wounded and they had to use an electromagnet to keep a bunch of shrapnel from reaching Tony's heart (oh, old-school comic book origins) after a bit of a conversation, Tony manages to outwit his captors by building the first Iron Man armour, and also creating a miniaturized arc reactor -- an energy source that's a much, much smaller version of one of his father's inventions. 

Okay, so that's his superpower. He invents stuff, and this time, he invents a robotic suit of armour. But during the escape, Yinsen is killed, and the movie really makes Yinsen and Stark's short relationship really count. The fact that Yinsen's death is explicitly caused by him running out to hold off the Ten Rings terrorists to buy Tony time? Yeah, I feel like beyond anything else in Tony Stark's backstory, that's the one event that really hammers home just how much people are suffering and dying, and he could've help prevent all of this. 

Tony returns back to civilization and basically disbands Stark Industries' weapons program, and throughout all of this we get to see Tony's interactions with three characters -- his long-suffering best friend Colonel James Rhodes (played by Terrence Howard in this movie); his secretary and kinda-sorta love interest Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow) and his business mentor and vaguely father-like figure Obadiah Stane (Jeff Bridges). All three of them are really fun, particularly Obadiah, who's particularly great when he hams things up. Rounding out the cast are the soft-spoken government man Phil Coulson (Clark Gregg) who really just wants a meeting with Stark and Tony's loyal driver Happy Hogan (director Jon Favreau).

The movie is also pretty much focused at Tony, though, and we get to see a couple of montages of his trial-and-error as he develops and improves on his armour, creating a sleeker, more stable suit with his two adorable arm-robots (Dummy! I love Dummy!) and as the world gets confused about Tony suddenly getting accountability, he basically realizes that the only people he can trust is basically Pepper. Especially when Obadiah Stane continues to try and pry into Tony's miniature arc reactor. Obadiah is... he's pretty basic as far as villains go, if we're being honest, but Jeff Bridges's performance is pretty great and if nothing else, he's pretty memorable. 

Ultimately, though, when Tony finds out from the reporter he screwed earlier in the movie* that Stark weaponry are still being produced and used to attack Yinsen's home village of Gulmira, we get Iron Man finally taking matters into his own hands. With red and gold armour, this whole scene of Iron Man fighting against terrorists is pretty damn badass. The tank-destroying missile; the slow 'target-and-calmly-shoot-missiles' moment; the modulated voice; and even the little fight-escape bit against two fighter jets are all very, very well-done. 

*The blatant fanservice between Christine Everheart's sex scene and the brief stewardess pole-dancers are things that totally would never fly in a superhero movie released in this decade.

I haven't talked too much about Pepper, have I? She actually has a rather significant amount of screentime in this movie, and I actually do like how she's built up not just as 'oh, Tony likes her'. And Tony does, but I really also do like that Pepper is very much established as a confidante, as someone Tony trusts, and while there certainly are a couple moments of romantic awkwardness, I do like that their romantic relationship is left up in the air by the end of the movie, and that she actually gets a nice little sub-plot of helping Tony find information about the depths of Obie's betrayal. 

Obadiah Stane basically causes a company coup to oust Tony as CEO, and through Pepper's little espionage, we find out that not only is Obadiah very much interested in profiteering, he's also the one responsible for sending the Ten Rings after Tony in the first place. And, well, after getting rid of the Ten Rings, Obadiah's salvaged the rest of Tony's original armour to create one of his own. Obadiah disables Tony and steals his arc reactor, but with the help of Dummy and Pepper not throwing away the original arc reactor from earlier in the movie, Tony gets to suit up and fight Obadiah in his Iron Monger armour. 

Again, not too much to say about the fight. It's well-done, and pretty impressive especially considering the time that this movie was made. The fight on the streets, and later on the little Chekov's Gun of Tony having actually taken his equipment on test-drives and knows all about the defrosting issue of flying too high? Pretty neat stuff. With Pepper's help, Obadiah gets taken down... and, in probably one of the most iconic moments and subversions in these superhero shows, Tony decides to not follow the cards handed to him as a cover story by the helpful government S.H.I.E.L.D. agent Coulson and declares to the world that he is 'Iron Man'. 

And... and more than anything, I really do like that a lot of Tony's themes in this movie revolves around accountability and redemption. The contrast between pre-Iron-Man Tony and how he's still snarks around but is clearly putting himself in harm's way for the good of others? Especially since Tony clearly feels a massive sense of guilt for letting Yinsen die and not stopping all of Stark Industries's bloody history. The themes aren't really shoehorned down our throats, but it's clear that the writer and the actor involved really wanted to portray these themes in a way, leading to Tony Stark's character arc in this movie feeling pretty cohesive. Toss in the good pacing, a pretty tight script and cool robot-on-robot action fighting... yeah, this first movie is still a pretty damn good one. 

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Marvel Easter Eggs Corner:

Since I've already done most of the actual "origins of these heroes in the comics" when I covered the Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes cartoon (and because it'd take too much time to talk about each and every character), this will cover the a bunch of recurring things I'll talk about, as well as actual Easter Eggs. I don't want this to get overly-long like they do in some of my other reviews.

• Post-Credits Scene: The very first one ever! Nick Fury shows up to talk to Iron Man about how he's not the only special person in the world, and talks about an "Avengers Initiative". 
• Stan the Man: Stan Lee's first MCU cameo is as a guest in the Stark gala, who Tony identifies as 'Hef'. Whether Stan is meant to be playing Hugh Hefner or if Tony just mistakes 'Stan' for Hefner is debatable. 
• Future Movie Foreshadowing: In addition to the Avengers Initiative being mentioned by Fury in the post-credits scene, we also get Coulson introducing us to SHIELD; Roxxon being name-dropped; and Rhodey looking at the silver-coloured Mark II armour and saying 'next time, baby', and the character gets to suit up as War Machine in the next movie. 
• Movie Superhero Codenames:
• Tony doesn't come up with the name 'Iron Man' until reading a newspaper near the end of the movie, but then swiftly adopts it with the iconic "I am Iron Man".
• Coulson kept reintroducing his agency with their long, extended name before finally shortening it to S.H.I.E.L.D. at the end of the movie. 
• While Obadiah Stane is never referred to by his comic book counterpart's supervillain name, he does name-drop it while talking to Tony, about how they're both 'Iron Mongers'. 
• Favourite Action Scene: I'm going to include this one here for every MCU movie. This is a tough one -- I really like the final Iron Man/Iron Monger battle, but I think my favourite still has to be Mark III's first deployment as it absolutely eviscerates the Ten Rings and Tony has to actually struggle to not kill the fighter jets. 
• Funniest Line: Say it with me: "Tony Stark was able to build this! In a cave! With a box of scraps!"
• Iron Man's cartoon theme is his cell phone ring tone. 
• When Iron Man is having his suit taken off in his basement, an incomplete Captain America shield could be seen on a desk in the background.