Movie Review: Avengers: Age of Ultron

Avengers: Age of Ultron [2015]

Putting aside the otherwise-standalone Ant-Man, This movie is essentially the climax of Marvel Cinematic Universe's Phase Two... and if we're being honest, the movies that lead up to this one is really only just Captain America: Winter Soldier. The other two, Iron Man 3 and Thor: The Dark World only really tangentially tie in to this one, insomuch that they feature characters that also show up here. And seeing that the Tony in this movie is basically back to his regular tricks, it does mean that his 'big lesson' at the end of Iron Man 3 is kind of forgotten. 

Avengers: Age of Ultron isn't very fondly remembered by most of the fanbase. And while Dark World and perhaps Iron Man 2 or Incredible Hulk would be remembered for being the worst, Age of Ultron is a movie that's jam-packed full of way, way too much plot points, and the movie suffers a lot from it. One thing that saves it, however? The sheer amount of cast members and just how batshit-fun this movie is. It is unapologetically just trying to be a comic-book movie, jumping from one joke to the next, from one fun action scene to the next, from one new character introduction to the next. When I sat down to watch Age of Ultron last month, it actually baffled me just how much they tried to stuff into this movie when a lot of them really could've been done... basically elsewhere. 

Just on top of my head, this movie tries to foreshadow the 'Civil War' conflict between Iron Man and Captain America; it tries to foreshadow both Ragnarok and the Infinity Gauntlet, while also introducing the concept of Infinity Stones to the Earth-bound cast; it stealthily introduces Wakanda and Ulysses Klaue... and all of that while also debuting the characters Scarlet Witch, Vision, Quicksilver and Ultron. Oh, and we get Hawkeye's biggest character moment in the MCU, as well as a terrible romance between Black Widow and Bruce Banner tossed randomly into the movie. If you couldn't tell... the movie is pretty bloated. Thankfully, it's fun! I enjoyed watching the movie, because I enjoy watching superheroes beat up waves and waves of generic robots. But take a step back, and, well, no one can deny that the movie's pretty bloated. 

The movie starts off with a cold open -- the Avengers dealing with a relatively minor threat, and it's fun! I actually like this fun implication that these superheroes have fun beating up minor villains in their spare time. Baron Wolfgang von Strucker is one of the final members of Hydra, and he's got goons with alien lasers and a castle with a forcefield! We get to see our heroes show off what they can do, with a new Iron Man armour and Captain America's magnet-shield gauntlet thing and the Hulk just bashing people up... pretty cool stuff. Without describing this action scene too much, it basically ends pretty quickly, with Strucker unleashing 'the twins', a pair of enhanced metahumans created by Hydra experiments with Loki's Scepter. Pietro/Quicksilver and Wanda/Scarlet Witch are... well, they're basically ciphers in this movie. What Maria Hill would describe them as -- "he's fast and she's weird" -- basically applies to how they are in the entire movie. Just a pair of superpowered humans who clearly are kind, but are oppressed enough that they fell in with the wrong crowd. 

As Tony finds Loki's Scepter in the Hydra compound, Wanda does her ambiguously-defined magical tricks to give Tony a terrifying vision of the Avengers being shattered in the face of a large alien invasion. Wanda's powers are basically just handwaved as fear illusions and limited telekinesis in this movie, but it does kind of fit just how galvanized Tony becomes after this scene? It's just that the movie itself moves so fast, and watching this so closely to Iron Man 3 does make the character feel like he's kind of going through the same motions that he went through in that movie. It is perfectly believable that he would regress back to paranoia, but I really wished that it was handled better, and that we're given just a bit more time for this plot point to impact on us. 

I did like Tony basically manipulating the rest of the Avengers to let him investigate Loki's Scepter for a couple of days, and he gets Bruce Banner into helping him. They decide to use the supercomputer intelligence they develop with Loki's Scepter (it contains the Mind Stone, but the script just kind of handwaves it as generic superhero sci-fi) into "Ultron", a global defense program that Tony sees as the natural development of his Iron Legion. 

Of course, Ultron becomes sentient. And James Spader's performance as Ultron is easily the best part of this movie! He might ultimately just boil down to being a generic evil robot supervillain, but Spader's voice and mannerisms, especially in this early conversation where he and JARVIS converse in the strange void of computer systems, really does sell the scene of Ultron's confusion on waking up and his realization on how much humanity sucks. 

While the Avengers are celebrating their victory (featuring some fun cameos by Maria Hill, Falcon and War Machine in the party; as well as the fun Mjolnir scene), Ultron kills and absorbs JARVIS, and then takes over Stark's Iron Legion armour. This leads to another fun action scene where most of our heroes are out of costume, and, again, Ultron delivers some absolutely fucking creepy line readings in this scene. They beat up the Ultrons, but turns out that these are just hollow puppet bodies, and the real Ultron has basically uploaded himself into Baron Strucker's Hydra base in Sokovia.

(Which the Avengers didn't properly clean up, I guess? Or is there a second secret room? I've never thought about this until writing that paragraph.)

Things go very quickly here as we kind of jump around different scenes quickly. Ultron recruits Pietro and Wanda and promises them revenge against Tony Stark, who the twins blame for creating the weapons that fucked up Sokovia. Ultron also kills Baron Strucker off-screen. The Avengers figure out that Ultron is looking for vibranium, and both teams end up in Johannesburg to meet with the arms dealer Ulysses Klaue, the only person to have sufficient quantities of vibranium after stealing it from the African nation of Wakanda. 

And... can I say just how much I adore Ultron's scene in here? We don't really get a whole ton about Ultron since the movie's mostly action scenes, but the dismissive way that he wires a bunch of money into Klaue's account and notes in disgust how greedy humans are; or him actually sounding like he felt bad for accidentally slicing off Klaue's arm in a temper tantrum... it's fun. 

And then we get yet another action scene, with Iron Man fighting against Ultron, while the twins fight the rest of the Avengers. Wanda manages to whammy Captain America, Thor and Black Widow to show them their greatest fears, but then Hawkeye manages to zap her. And... and I am someone who really likes these sort of 'personalized hell' stuff. And there's great moments here! Captain America's greatest fear is seeing everyone from his World War II days becoming old and that he'd be the only one still alive when everyone else is a corpse -- in essence, a continuation of his 'soldier out of a war' theme that we explored in Avengers. Black Widow gets a flashback to ominous showcases in the Red Room, which we wouldn't really explore until a decade later in her solo movie. Thor gets to see... kinda-Ragnarok? Thor's part is the most nebulous one of it all. But none of these are even explored in this movie, which makes it so frustrating because in the grand scheme of things, I really did feel like these Wanda-nightmares could really have been something that the other movies take great mileage out of. 

But then we had to have the big fighty-fight! The Maximoffs retreat after getting spooked by how Hawkeye manages to dispatch Wanda, and they send the Hulk into a rampage. Which leads to, of course, the big, trailer-friendly action scene between the Hulk and Iron Man in the "Veronica" Hulkbuster armour. Which... not going to lie, is a very, very fucking badass scene. Without making this review as bloated as the movie (since we're only in the halfway point!) suffice to say that this fight scene really appeals to the inner child within me. 

The backlash from the Hulk causing widespread destruction turns public opinion against the Avengers, causing them to take a breather in Hawkeye's farmhouse. And the scenes here... it's good for Hawkeye! It's very good for Hawkeye. Easily the character who gets nothing to do outside of action scenes in the first Avengers movie, Clint ends up being so humanized by simply just being an everyman who has a wife and kids, being just an everyman that holds the rest of the big egos in the group together. That's amazing. And while it's a bit on-the-nose, Tony and Steve's argument next to the log-cutting macho stuff also works pretty well, albeit it's, again, not explored as much. 

What's not so amazing, however, are all the other plotlines going on here. There's a very good scene of Thor stepping on one of the children's toys and maybe realizing that he's more destructive than he cares to admit... but then we don't follow up on this at all, Thor goes off to recruit Erik Selvig, and then goes off into a pool for a completely irrelevant vision and disappears until the third act. Throughout the first chunk of the movie we get a frankly out-of-nowhere romance between Bruce and Natasha, which... I don't know. It's just something that feels particularly bizarre, and feels particularly shoehorned in Natasha's part, especially when she waxes lyrical about how she can't have children because of the Red Room... something that feels bizarre for this character specifically. With how well Natasha was handled in Winter Soldier, this honestly feels like a huge step back. Also something that's perhaps a bit less noticeable but still grating are the many, many obvious 'ooo death flag' around Hawkeye. 

Nick Fury shows up to whip everyone back to shape, and they go off to Seoul. Ultron uses Loki's Scepter to mind-control Dr. Helen Cho (who shows up in the party earlier) to steal her synthetic-tissue technology. And combining that with the stolen vibranium and the Mind Stone within Loki's scepter, Ultron plans to create a brand-new body. Wanda does some mind-reading, sees that Ultron's a complete lunatic that wants to cause human extinction, and the two immediately turn on Ultron. I really wish I could pretend that there's something more to this, but nope. 

And then...  action scene! Again, it's a pretty cool action scene! Captain America fight Ultron on top of a truck while Black Widow chases them with a motorcycle. It's all pretty cool and stuff! Later on, thanks to a runaway train, the Maximoffs change sides and help Captain America stop the train. Black Widow manages to push Ultron's weird super-special-awesome synthetic-cyborg body into the Quinjet, but she herself gets captured by Ultron. 

Tony being Tony, he uploads what's left of the JARVIS A.I. (who he had been recovering) into the synthetic body. There's something very sweet about this act considering what a constant JARVIS has been throughout all the movies prior to this one, but it's an act that's really kind of glossed over. We get a bit of a prototype civil war because Captain America and the Maximoffs don't want to activate another super-robot, while Tony, Clint and Bruce want to. Thor shows up and ends the conflict by zapping the synthetic body with his lightning, creating the birth of Vision. 

And, yes. All of this goes on super-duper quickly. Thor's mystical vision isn't really elaborated on; Vision basically tells us that he's basically kind of the evolution of JARVIS but not the same thing, plus he earns the team's trust by lifting Mjolnir; the Maximoffs join the team basically wholeheartedly regardless of their past sins or motivations; Black Widow sees Ultron in a new (barely different) vibranium body and manages to contact the Avengers... and then we gear up for the final battle. 

And the final battle is awesome. From an action movie standpoint, for all of the rush that we had to get to this point, it's awesome. It takes up a significant portion of the movie, and it involves Ultron creating a delightfully comic-book plan of putting rockets to lift up an entire city and then drop it back to the Earth to create an extinction event to wipe out humanity. Thanks to Ultron being a giant swarm of robots, we get all out heroes fighting all the little Ultron robots, while all of them also being able to taunt and engage with our heroes with James Spader's delightful voice. 

There are some character moments here, which I'll briefly highlight. There's probably the very bland resolution to the Widow/Hulk storyline, with Natasha pushing Banner off a cliff to trigger his transformation into the Hulk, which... yeah, I guess there's a point to be made to her caring more about the mission or something? Hawkeye delivers a very, very awesome speech to Wanda when she gets a bit of a panic attack about being an Avenger, and I love that he gives the young woman a choice to escape. There's the badass arrival of Nick Fury and the good SHIELD with the Helicarriers (also, War Machine!), with Captain America telling Quicksilver that this is what SHIELD should be. And, of course, there are the action scenes. So many great action scenes, culminating in all the eight Avengers fighting a bunch of Ultrons while the camera spins around them. 

Ultimately, though, the main Ultron body gets tossed around, and attempts to kill Hawkeye... but Quicksilver runs in the way to take the bullets. I really want to say that this is some sort of huge heroic sacrifice, but honestly... the movie really doesn't take that much time to develop the Maximoff twins at all, and when any development happens it is for Wanda. So other than the shock value, it really is hard to say that I care all that much about this incarnation of Quicksilver dying. I know that the Maximoff twins are, at the time this movie was made, being 'shared' between Marvel and Fox (who uses Quicksilver more prominently), but even then it really does feel like Pietro's role in this movie feels so minimal. 

Hulk also leaves the movie in a very confused manner, beating and tossing Ultron Prime out of a Quinjet but then just... shuts off communications. We really don't know too much about Hulk's mindset throughout all this. Or Banner's. Or how they relate to each other. We do get a bit of a resolution with Thor: Ragnarok, but I did remember this being such a randomly tacked-on part to the movie. 

Anyway, our heroes rescue the day -- Iron Man and Thor do the plot device thing to blow up the landmass; Scarlet Witch hunts down Ultron Prime and rips out his heart for revenge; Vision hunts down the final Ultron drone and zaps him. We then get a pretty quick montage showing where the heroes go, with Thor leaving back to Asgard, Iron Man buggering off and basically becoming an independent guest star/consultant, Hawkeye retires to be with his family, and Captain America and Black Widow have a brand-new team of Avengers -- Scarlet Witch, Vision, War Machine and Falcon. 

And... I'm not going to say this is an unenjoyable movie, because I had a lot of fun watching this. And I do know that a lot of the stuff and themes built up here would be followed up -- albeit later on -- in movies like Thor: Ragnarok, Captain America: Civil War, or in TV projects like WandaVision. But that really doesn't excuse the fact that this movie is so bloated. It tries to do way too much, to fit in way too much, and while it's kind of inevitable when you try to adapt so much comic-book history and try introduce as many characters as possible in a single movie, Age of Ultron is definitely when they stretched it a bit too thin. The Maximoff twins and Vision's introduction are very rushed, Thor's visions feel so redundant, but the worst part is definitely the scripting for the Bruce/Natasha romance. Bless the actors for trying their best, but the direction just feels so forced for both characters and the rest of the MCU would rightfully later just ignore this romance. 

Thankfully, there's a clear line after this movie where they scaled things back a bit, and for the most part did a pretty good job at keeping each individual movie focused on something without making it feel way too bloated. This movie, meanwhile, feels like I'm reading the bare bones of a superhero comic-book crossover TPB without any of the accompanying build-up. It's still at least a fun action movie, though, and I'll give the movie credit for that. .

Marvel Easter Eggs Corner:

• Post-Credits Scene: Thanos takes the Infinity Gauntlet and claims that he's going to 'do it [himself]'. Knowing what we do from subsequent movies, this event presumably takes place immediately before his Infinity Stone search prior to Avengers: Infinity War.
• Stan the Man: Stan Lee is a WWII veteran that the credits identify as 'himself', as one of Steve's friends that ends up getting really hammered from Thor's Asgardian alcohol. Stan Lee did actually serve in World War II, and he gets to say his real-life catchphrase of 'excelsior'.
• Future Movies Foreshadowing: So many. The nation of Wakanda, its association with Vibranium, and Ulysses Klaue's role as a minor antagonist, foreshadow Black Panther. Thor's weird vision foreshadows (in a way) the destruction of Asgard in Thor: Ragnarok. More of a backstory revelation, but Black Widow gets a flashback to the Red Room that would eventually be explored in Black Widow. Going through Thor's vision frame-by-frame is a nebulous shot of Thanos's Infinity Gauntlet with the Infinity Stones. Steve is also shown to be able to budge Mjolnir.
• Past Movie Continuity: Hydra and Baron Strucker was introduced as antagonists in Captain America: The Winter Soldier; and Hydra smuggling powerful weapons and artifacts is a plotline from that movie. Loki's scepter from The Avengers return, and is revealed to be the Mind Stone. Also from The Avengers are Chitauri technology, including a Leviathan, show up in Strucker's base. Hawkeye references his brainwashing in The Avengers. Falcon briefly references their 'missing persons' case, referencing the search for Bucky from Winter Soldier. 
• Movie Superhero Codenames: Ultron and Vision are referred to as those, since they don't really have any other names to go by. Wanda and Pietro Maximoff are never called 'Scarlet Witch' and 'Quicksilver', though Tony does call her a 'little witch' exactly once in the movie. The movie mostly calls the Avengers by their civilian names (though 'Hawkeye' finally gets name-dropped in this movie) by everyone except for Ultron -- Ultron very consistently calls everyone by their superhero names. 
• Favourite Action Scene: Hulk-vs-Hulkbuster. The one with all the Avengers assembled tossing a giant horde of Ultron robots in a room at the end is a runner up. 
• Funniest Line: Less of a line and more physical comedy, but Vision casually handing Thor Mjolnir and everyone just looking dumbfounded. 
• Among Tony's spare A.I. discs is one labeled 'Jocasta', another A.I. from the comics.
• Ulysses Klaue's dossier, if you pause to read it, references that he was sent to kill King T'Chaka (who would show up in Captain America: Civil War), and his ancestor was killed by a previous bearer of the Black Panther mantle. 
• Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch did start off their comic-book career as members of the evil Brotherhood of Mutants. Baron Strucker also experimented on two mutant twins, though they were his own children, codenamed "Fenris" in the comics. 
• Ultron introduces himself to the Maximoffs with a red shroud over his head, a reference to how in the comics he was initially introduced as a villain called "Crimson Cowl". 
• When talking about his alcohol, Thor name-drops Brunnhilde, the alter-ego of the superhero Valkyrie. Brunnhilde/Valkyrie would actually show up in Thor: Ragnarok, but it's clear that that is their first meeting. It could be a different Brunnhilde, though! 

Movie Review: Guardians of the Galaxy

Guardians of the Galaxy [2014]

This is, perhaps, one of the biggest gamble that Disney/Marvel had taken during its tenure. After the huge success of The Avengers and a bunch of sequel movies, the fandom was eagerly anticipating what's to come next... and it felt like Marvel was simply just going to adapt the prominent or practical parts of their repertoire. The likes of Ant-Man, Black Panther, Ghost Rider, Doctor Strange, Daredevil, and all that. And while it was exciting, it also meant that all we're going to expect is a bunch of well-known A-listers and B-listers from Marvel comics all adapted to the movie screen, and sometimes they crossover in an Avengers or Captain America movie. Which, admittedly, still would be a pretty successful franchise. 

But in 2014, Marvel took a gloriously off-the-wall gamble with Guardians of the Galaxy. Perhaps echoed most perfectly with the memetic delivery of 'Who?' by Djimon Honsou's Korath, the Guardians... they aren't a particularly super-prominent group in Marvel lore. This isn't even the original group known as the "Guardians", but are a newer incarnation of the group that appeared far more recently in 2004-ish! Or at least, I haven't encountered or even heard of them before. But then again, perhaps the lack of recognizability made them even more interesting to the public. This also gives the studios some free rein to actually build up the wild and wacky 'cosmic' side of Marvel comics without interfering too much in the more grounded and down-to-earth stories told by heroes like Captain America, Iron Man or the Hulk. We get the first real hints of who the enigmatic Thanos is from the post-credits scene of The Avengers, and this movie also sets up the plotline of the Infinity Stones, which would be the driving force behind the Phase 2 and a majority of the Phase 3 movies. 

And to top it off, Guardians of the Galaxy is just a really, really fun movie. None of the other Marvel movies (even the more drab Thor: The Dark World) are all that serious, but Guardians is perhaps the movie that truly solidified the Marvel formula. James Gunn's direction takes all of the oddities and wackiness of comic-book nonsense and plays it at face value, and that ends up with a movie that feels like it's truly respecting the roots of these characters while also being a fun ride. Sure, there's a raccoon running around cursing and shooting oversized space cannons, and he pals around with a giant tree-human whose only vocabulary consists of tree three words. The movie does sometimes lampshade this a bit, but they don't do it too far that they are making fun of the very concept that the movie is trying to adapt. It's just something weird that happens in this part of the galaxy, and... well, it's wacky comic-book space! It's gloriously weird, and I love it. 

The direction is very great as well -- obviously no sort of real sci-fi rules are really going to apply here, so, just like Star Wars, they decide to make everything as colourful and vibrant as possible. Which, after a decade of looking at sci-fi video games and movies that try too hard to take themselves super-seriously, is definitely a breath of fresh air. And not to mention the soundtrack! I'd be remiss to do so. Filled with 60's and 70's music that also ties in to main character Star-Lord's own love for the genre, I absolutely love the energy that beams from the soundtrack of this movie. 

The story itself is, again, pretty basic. It's something we've all seen before! It's basically Star Wars or Avengers, but with assholes as their protagonists (it's a smart move that they actually got rid of perhaps one of the more famous comic-book character associated with this team, the very heroic Nova). I've compared this a lot to what's basically your average Dungeons & Dragons campaign, where a half-dozen characters, each with their own basic tragic backstories, meet each other, get into trouble, and have to band together to fight the evil villain. All the characters are, to some degree, developed pretty well in this movie and we learn just enough about them, and each of them get a fair bit of resolution.

Our main character -- or the primary one, anyway -- is Peter Quill, and our first scene shows a young him being abducted from Earth by a group of aliens after his mother's death. And then we cut to the now-iconic opening scene of Guardians of the Galaxy, where we get to see Peter Quill grown up -- a man in a badass jacket and a very cool-looking mask with glowing eyes... and he starts singing and dancing to Blue Swede's "Hooked on a Feeling". That's the kind of movie this is, and while the movie doesn't milk it all that much, it also makes it clear that Peter's only ties to his previous human life is the walkman that happens to be in his bag when he was abducted by the Ravagers.

The movie doesn't really waste too much time introducing the plot device, too -- arguably one of the reasons why Thor: The Dark World plodded on so badly in its first half. Star-Lord pillages a strange-looking metallic orb from a typical booby-trapped fortress in the planet of Morag, which is our plot device in this movie. He is quickly stopped by Korath, leading to the aforementioned 'Who' scene, one of my all-time favourite scenes in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

In-between Star-Lord's action scene as he uses his gravity mines to elude Korath, the movie is pretty quick in world-building this part of space. Star-Lord's a renegade member of a group of thieves called the Ravagers, led by the blue-skinned alien Yondu Udonta -- who abducted him in the past. Korath is working for a particularly fanatical religious zealot from the Kree people, Ronan the Accuser. And Star-Lord buggers off, intending to sell the orb on his own... leading Yondu to put a bounty out for Peter's capture. It's pretty clever how this exposition happens, too, with Yondu calling Peter to admonish him for betraying the Ravagers, and we're hinted to Ronan's nature when the black market fence refuses to deal with Peter because he stole the orb from Ronan. 

Peter then shows up on the planet Xandar, a typical bustling metropolis, where we're pretty quickly introduced to the other members of the main cast. Gamora, the 'most dangerous woman in the galaxy', is hunting down Peter's orb because she's working with Ronan. Meanwhile, Rocket Raccoon and his giant tree companion Groot is trying to cash in on the bounty the Ravagers put out. We get a brief action sequence that shows off these characters' personalities and what they can do -- Gamora is an assassin; Rocket has lots of huge cannons; and the absolutely charming Groot is simple-minded but can grow massive tree-vines. However, shooting each other in the middle of a city ends up leading to them being captured by the space policemen -- the Nova Corps.

And then our heroes are all tossed in the Kyln, a space prison... and it's pretty fun how they interact there. The movie quickly establishes Groot as being simple-minded, and both Peter and Rocket are very much greedy bastards and they quickly forge an alliance to split the money from selling the orb with each other. In the prison, too, they meet the final member of the main cast -- the literal-minded Drax the Destroyer, who is a known badass in this part of the galaxy, and someone with a gigantic desire for vengeance against Ronan and his master Thanos, who are responsible for the destruction of his planet and his family. We also learn a bit more about Gamora, who's planning to betray Ronan because she doesn't want to allow the Accuser to abuse the orb's powers. 

This leads to one of my favourite action sequences in the movie -- the prison breakout. Everything is so utterly chaotic and all the dialogue are snippy... and I don't think I'm able to describe just how fun this part of the movie is without being too verbose about it. And while the team is mostly held together by their common enemy (or common desire for money, in the case of Peter and Rocket), we have the Guardians of the Galaxy escaping the prison on their ship.

Around this point we keep cutting away to see Ronan the Accuser, and... he's remembered as a pretty one-dimensional character. And he is! All he wants is to destroy Xandar because he's angry that it had entered a peace treaty with his homeworld of Kree. He's a zealot continuing a war that has been resolved. He has a big-ass hammer! We learn this in the very first scene Ronan shows up in, where he murders some Xandarian and bathes in his blood. But what I forgot was how absolutely entertaining Lee Pace's performance as Ronan is, with his absolutely killer delivery of Ronan's grandiose monologues. This single factor elevates Ronan so much more beyond the likes of less memorable villains like Malekith or Alexander Pierce. And, you know, fits into the whole 'this is a D&D campaign' description pretty well. 

Ronan is in cahoots with the enigmatic Thanos, who's just sitting on a throne. The audience probably is able to recognize Thanos from The Avengers, but the movie doesn't need you to know this to understand that Thanos is just an uber-warlord that is super-duper dangerous. Thanos lends Ronan another one of his adoptive children, the cyborg Nebula, in order to reclaim the orb.

Meanwhile, the Guardians arrive in Knowhere -- the moon-sized hollowed-out head of some sort of ancient alien. They enter the realm of the Collector, itself such a fun location where he's got a massive museum of trapped alien beings. The Collector also deigns to finally explain what the true nature of the plot device is -- it's an Infinity Stone, one of six very powerful artifacts that are created during the dawn of time. It's very cool backstory that builds up the tapestry of future movies, while in itself doesn't really change too much of this movie. The Collector's assistant then proceeds to blow herself up, showing off just how dangerous merely touching the Infinity Stone is. 

The Knowhere scene is pretty great, too, at showing just how frayed everyone is. Peter tries to flirt with Gamora, only to discover that having been raised as an assassin since birth, Gamora isn't really someone accustomed with emotions. Drax, being literal-minded, accidentally insults Rocket Raccoon, who, despite his huge ego and bluster, has a massive inferiority complex relating to how everyone keeps seeing him as either an animal or a lab rat. And we also get Drax, who, in drunken anger, gets tired of how everyone isn't interested in immediate revenge against Ronan, causing him to drunkenly and stupidly make a call to Ronan, challenging him in the middle of Knowhere's streets. 

With the Guardians split up, they're easily dispatched off by the villains. Ronan beats Drax almost effortlessly and seems even confused with just who Drax is. Nebula and Gamora confront each other and they show off their little rivalry, and in the subsequent space battle, Nebula leaves Gamora for dead in space and steals the orb. Star-Lord, desperate to save Gamora, gives his helmet to her and surrenders himself to Yondu, the leader of the Ravagers. Again, I really do like how all the antagonists of the movie is somehow tied to the backstory to one of the heroes. 

Yondu is less of a true villain, though, and more of a wild-card. Clearly having a soft spot for Peter even though he has a pretty aggressive temperament, Peter quickly manages to give Yondu a counter-offer, telling him of how they could turn this around into a heist to get the orb. Meanwhile, Rocket and Groot rescue Drax from drowning, and we get a pretty short but neat scene of Rocket and Drax, in their own unique ways, acknowledging that they fucked up and they apologize. Obviously, their subsequent plan of trying to blow up the Ravager ship to force them to give up Peter and Gamora isn't very smart, but at least they tried!

And then, in the Ravager ship, Peter gives a bit of a rousing speech to the Guardians of the Galaxy... and it's an interesting twist. None of these guys are really the hero type. They're not soldiers like Captain America or gods charged with protecting weaker beings like Thor, which is what, I feel, makes their decision to band together and to, in Peter's words, "give a shit" because they "are assholes, but not 100% a dick", feels pretty neat. And, of course, we get the hilarious scene that parodies most action movies showing the heroes suiting up and getting their equipment... but our heroes are yawning and scratching their backs and crotches and stuff. 

Ronan himself has also betrayed Thanos. He embeds the Infinity Stone onto his giant warhammer, and tells Thanos to screw off, before going off to destroy the planet Xandar. We've also learned of the mistreatment done to both Gamora and Nebula when Thanos groomed them up into being assassins, and Nebula betrays Thanos at the drop of a hat, believing that Ronan with the Power Stone is a match for Thanos. 

The final battle is... well, it definitely is a pretty cool final battle. We get a space portion of the battle with Peter managing to rally not only the Ravagers, but also the Nova Corps and their very cool beehive-forcefield ships. As the Nova Corps and the Ravagers hold back Ronan's giant ship, most of the heroes get individual times to shine. We even get to see Yondu show off his power -- manipulating an arrow to instantly slay a dozen of Ronan's minions with a flying arrow. Gamora and Nebula get a confrontation as well, fighting on a different part of the ship before Gamora ultimately wins -- but Nebula refuses to be shown mercy by Gamora, instead preferring to fall off. In this conflict, Korath fights Star-Lord before ultimately getting killed by Drax, while Ronan kills a significant portion of the Nova Corps, including one that resolved his previous enmity with Peter. 

However, Ronan is still too powerful for mere daggers, guns and cannons to stop, and as the Dark Aster crashes down on Xandar's surface, Groot transforms into a massive ball to protect his friends, sacrificing himself in the process. It's surprisingly poignant -- Groot isn't a character who is developed much beyond being a gentle giant, and being everyone's friend... but the fact that he is so lovable and gets incinerated by the explosion does make it pretty sad. Groot does come back, but still. 

The way that Ronan gets defeated is... well, it's a subversion in and of itself, and it's kind of a cheesy one. But I do really feel that this movie did earn it. Distracting Ronan with a dance-off, Star-Lord manages to get Ronan off-guard before Rocket blows up the warhammer. Peter grabs the stone, and while the stone was established to be 'too powerful for a single person to hold', everyone holds hands and shares the burden of the stone, surviving and vaporizing Ronan in the process. Super-cheesy, admittedly, but a subsequent movie would actually offer a less-cheesy explanation. 

In the aftermath, Peter tricks Yondu into getting an empty container, which earns the older Ravager's respect when he realizes the trick done by his protégé. Peter also earns the respect of the representatives of the Nova Corps -- Nova Prime and Rhomann Dey, who treat them as heroes. And the Guardians of the Galaxy blast off into space, with one of the sticks left behind from Groot's destruction growing into a tiny, potted-plant baby Groot. 

And... and as I have noted early on, the plot really isn't all that complex. A bunch of colourful characters meet each other, band together and defeat the villain. That applies to easily most of fantasy or sci-fi stories out there. But it's not just the comedy, the tone and the soundtrack that works. I really do feel that Guardians of the Galaxy's greatest strength is to give all the characters, even more minor ones like Nebula or Yondu, a fair amount of backstory and characterization. Small scenes like Yondu being a dick to the broker, or Drax being unable to understand metaphors, or Rocket being a dick that tells Peter to steal someone's prosthetic leg in the middle of a tense breakout... all of them are fun, but they also add up to building up these characters as actual people. I really could do a long analysis for a lot of these characters just by what we see in this movie!

And, yes, with the limited screentime of a single movie some characters are built up a bit less than others (this movie definitely prefers Peter and Rocket). But ultimately? Ultimately the movie is absolutely fun, and, more importantly, while being a very fun adventure it also lays the groundwork for a lot of the world-building for the MCU's cosmic, space side of things. And it does so in a way that doesn't diminish the primary story it's trying to tell -- something that other MCU movies like Iron Man 2, Thor: The Dark World and Avengers: Age of Ultron are guilty of doing. 

Anyway, an absolutely fun movie. 

Marvel Easter Eggs Corner:

• 
  Post-Credits Scene: The Collector mourns his broken collection while Howard the Duck, who has been freed from captivity, talks to him. 
• Stan the Man: Stan Lee is a 'pervy old man' that Rocket observes trying to pick up alien ladies in Xandar. 
• Future Movies Foreshadowing: This movie basically lays down the main plotline of the MCU up until Avengers: Endgame, establishing the creation of the six Infinity Stones and what they are. This movie also has Thanos show up in a minor role as the one pulling the strings not only for Ronan, but also for Loki in The Avengers. Yondu also briefly notes that Peter's real dad was a complete asshole, foreshadowing the plot of Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 2.
• Past Movie Continuity: The Tesseract (Captain America: The First Avenger and The Avengers) and the Aether (Thor: The Dark World) appear in the Collector's little monologue. Collector himself has also appeared before in the post-credits of Thor: The Dark World. Thanos and his minion, the Other, return from the post-credits of The Avengers. From those two movies, too, the Collector's collection also has a Dark Elf from Thor: The Dark World and a Chitauri from Avengers. 
• Movie Superhero Codenames: Most of the characters in this movie, being aliens, actually have their real names as what's essentially their superhero codename. It's played up with Star-Lord, though, where he tries to enforce his 'Star-Lord' moniker, but everyone either ignores it or mis-pronounces it as 'Space Lord' or 'Star Prince'. The team name 'Guardians of the Galaxy' is only spoken once by Ronan at the end in a mocking fashion. 
• Favourite Action Scene: I don't really have any preference in this one. I guess Groot and Rocket shooting up the Kyln?
• Funniest Line: Too many to choose from, mostly on Drax and Rocket's part. My favourite is probably Drax talking Peter up as a valuable ally against Ronan... before going "you are an imbecile." in the most perfect delivery ever. 
• Rhomann Dey is the Nova Prime that would recruit Richard Rider, the main Nova, in the comics. Gaarthan Saul is a Nova that would become the supervillain Supernova. The Nova Prime in this movie is Irani Rael, another minor Nova Corps character in the comics. 
• The alien girl that was in Star-Lord's ship at the beginning of the movie is Bereet, an actually important recurring character in the Hulk comics. Cozmo, the dog in an astronaut suit, is a member of several incarnations of the comic-book version of the Guardians. Marvel's talking duck character, Howard the Duck makes a cameo in the background and a more pronounced one in the post-credits scene. The Celestial known as Eson the Searcher shows up in the video that the Collector shows the Guardians. A Korbinite (Beta Ray Bill's race in the comics) also shows up in the Collector's collection. 
• While it's probably invalidated with Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 2, Adam Warlock's cocoon can be glimpsed in the background of the Collector's collection, and it's opened in the post-credits scene.

Movie Review: Captain America: The Winter Soldier

Captain America: The Winter Soldier [2014]

We're doing these movies by release order date, and honestly, I'm trying to keep these a bit shorter. That's the whole point of me doing these MCU movie reviews! It's to keep things short and concise. Between the past couple of reviews, I feel like I slipped back into old habits of describing almost every little thing in the movie. 

And... and I sat on this movie for a couple of days. Out of all the MCU movie reviews, Captain America: The Winter Soldier is probably one of the harder movies for me to review for the simple fact that I really don't have a whole ton to say short of summarizing the movie because... it's just so good. I keep thinking that I overrate this movie in my mind, but having rewatched this movie recently, and having the pleasure of rewatching Captain America: The First Avenger and The Avengers prior to this, it really does make me really feel for the themes of this movie particularly well. 

And... and I'm not sure I have it in me to articular why this movie is so good even compared to the MCU's pretty high standards. Okay, not all the movies in the MCU's "Phase Two" are winners. Thor: The Dark World and Avengers: Age of Ultron are messy at best, and boring at worst. I'm not the biggest fan of Iron Man 3 either. But Captain America: the Winter Soldier? This was the movie that, I feel, not only has the most solid story out of almost the entirety of the MCU movies, but also serves as a very good sequel for the themes introduced in previous MCU movies while also shaking up the status quo on the 'spy' side of this world. Oh, toss in some really cool action scenes, a fair chunk of continuity and some of the best character work I've seen for major MCU characters Captain America, Black Widow and Nick Fury? Yeah. This was the movie that, I feel, turned these three characters from well-acted adaptations of comic-book characters into actual characters of their own. 

The beginning of the movie is already pretty cool. We get a bit of a follow-up on the question of what an old man-out-of-time like Steve Rogers would do in the modern day, and we get to see him adjusting to modern life, including befriending another ex-soldier, Sam Wilson, while jogging. All that is done in-between missions, of course, which he undergoes with Black Widow and SHIELD's strike-force team, STRIKE. We get a pretty cool fight against comic-book villain Batroc the Leaper, and throughout the mission, Captain America finds out that not only is the SHIELD vessel actually doing some shady spy stuff, Black Widow is also running a secret intel-gathering information behind his back under Nick Fury's orders. 

It's a dilemma that gripped Steve Rogers during the events of The Avengers, which gets brought up but gets shelved aside thanks to the massive alien invasion happening shortly afterwards. Captain America is a soldier, and of course he's going to fight when his country asks him to. But when said country is also doing a lot of unsavoury, black-ops spy stuff? It's pretty neat to see Steve Rogers confront Nick Fury about it, and throughout the opening act of the movie I really do like that for every gesture of trust that people like Fury show Steve (like showing him Project Insight), we also get a couple that are revealed to be not so trustworthy (Steve's pretty nurse neighbour turning out to be SHIELD's "Agent 13").

The worldbuilding is also pretty good, too, introducing different facets of SHIELD as if they had been organically there, like the Triskelion, the World Government Council (briefly glimpsed in Avengers), the STRIKE  team, and the introduction of Secretary of Internal Security, Alexander Pierce. Nick Fury gets a bit suspicious about some aspects of Project Insight, and... and perhaps in another version of this story we'd be wondering if Nick Fury is actually the villain. And in the comics, we'd be right to wonder, but I feel like the MCU creators know that the audience is smart enough to know that it's not the case, so we quickly establish that Fury still has his comic-book counterpart's shiftiness, but is ultimately a good guy. 

And then, in a pretty cool extended scene, Nick Fury gets ambushed while driving by a bunch of mercenaries, leading to yet another pretty cool action scene. It feels like something out of the more grounded James Bond movies, with Nick Fury's car having some tricked-out machineguns and super-bulletproof glass and whatnot, and even while half-injured, Nick Fury still held out long enough to escape until the main villain, the eponymous Winter Soldier, shows up. He's got a metal arm, he's got a cool mask, and he's got wicked mascara game. 

Fury manages to escape to Steve's apartment, and I love all the spy-stuff going on here with Fury talking to Steve in code, and leaves the USB drive to him before Winter Soldier shows up and guns him down. We get a particularly cool confrontation between Steve and Winter Soldier, including a scene where Steve just shows how much of a super-soldier he is by bodily running through walls and jumping across buildings... but then the Winter Soldier just effortlessly catches Cap's vibranium shield. 

Fury is pronounced dead during surgery, and Steve, not trusting anyone, keeps the existence of Fury's USB drive hidden. I like how it's ambiguous just who among SHIELD is an enemy at this point, and how many of them are just working on the assumption that Nick Fury is a villain. Alexander Pierce brands Steve Rogers a fugitive, and since Steve doesn't know who to trust, he breaks out of the SHIELD Triskelion... which leads to one of the most iconic scenes in this movie, which is the cramped elevator fight that Steve has against STRIKE commander Brock Rumlow ("Crossbones" in the comics) and his entire squadron. And then he proceeds to ride a bike and take down a goddamn fighter jet with his shield, because he's Captain god-damn America. 

The only ally Steve seems to trust is Black Widow, and I really do like how they did this. An inferior movie would just have them meet, shrug that they're both former allies and move on. And I don't think we'd question it too much. But this is honestly one of the few movies that allowed Black Widow to actually act as a character. She's a reformed super-assassin herself, and she wants vengeance for Nick Fury. And she's just continually flummoxed at just how much Steve Rogers trusts her. I really do like that confrontation in the hospital when Steve tries to assert that he doesn't trust Natasha, but realizes that he really doesn't have much of an option. There's a bit of fun tension between the two, but I don't think the writers of this movie ever tried (or forced) it to become anything more than flirting. No, Black Widow's terribly-written romance will not come until Age of Ultron.

But I also really like this sequence of events, too, with Steve and Natasha just going around with minimal resources, trying to get information out of the USB drive from Apple stores and stuff, narrowly avoiding STRIKE commandos. This trail of clues (again, very old-school spy movie) leads them to a SHIELD bunker in Steve Rogers' old training camp, which is a nice call-back to Steve Rogers' ancient history. With finding that Peggy Carter was one of the original founders of SHIELD (oh yeah, Peggy also has a cameo earlier, having suffered from Alzheimer's in her old age), they also discover a secret basement containing an ancient supercomputer containing the preserved consciousness of Cap's old foe, Arnim Zola. It's probably one of the better adaptations of one of the more outlandish character concepts from the comics that would make sense in live-action. 

Arnim Zola gives a whole exposition speech, talking about how SHIELD has spent its time after World War II doing its version of Operation: Paperclip, but all that really succeeded in doing is to allow talented Hydra minds to flourish within SHIELD, and continue preserving a version of their organization. A secret organization within the secret organization! It actually kind of makes sense, in a creepily technical way -- humanity will surrender its freedom in exchange for security. We get hints that Hydra has been reshaping history in the background, with a neat little off-handed showcase that one of the things it did was to arrange for the deaths of Howard and Maria Stark. Something that's going to be very relevant later on! Arnim Zola, turns out, to have been stalling, because SHIELD missile-bombs the bunker. 

Around this point where Steve and Natasha figure things out, the audience also gets to see that the Winter Soldier is meeting with the head of Hydra within SHIELD -- Alexander Pierce. This goes beyond just grunts like Brock Rumlow or Jasper Sitwell, but all the way to the top. I love, too, the little subversion which felt refreshingly interesting at the time -- that the Winter Soldier is just a cool-looking goon that isn't even the main villain. Nowadays, even in the MCU itself, that sort of revelation is kind of played out. But when The Winter Soldier hit the screen, it was a bit of a refreshing shock that the titular villain isn't, in fact, the main villain. Hell, we even see Pierce essentially telling his goons to 'reprogram' Winter Soldier later on when he starts getting his memories back!

It's also delivered a bit more naturally throughout the movie, but we get the revelations that some of the minor characters we've seen in previous movies -- the senator from Iron Man 2 and Agent Jasper Sitwell from Thor -- are in fact working for Hydra. The audience doesn't really have to know who these guys are beyond 'ah, more Hydra agents within SHIELD/the government', but actually knowing who they are adds so much more to the MCU continuity fun. 

Meanwhile, Steve and Natasha end up meeting up with Sam Wilson, someone who they can be sure is out of SHIELD's reach. This is Sam's debut movie and... and he honestly really doesn't do much beyond being a nice guy and showing off the pretty cool 'Falcon' wingpack. It's a bit too mundane-ized in this movie, but the unfolding metal wings is definitely something that is synonymous with the live-action version of Falcon. Cap, Black Widow and Falcon interrogate Jasper Sitwell, and find out that with Arnim Zola's help, they have turned Project Insight into something that can instantly eliminate any individuals that can become threats to Hydra... including Cap's Avengers allies. It's the ultimate extreme of 'big brother is watching you', with these satellite-guided weapons just patrolling the world, shooting and killing every single dissident to what Hydra deems is 'order'. Again, it's a supervillain plan that even fits with the spy and subterfuge theme that's been emphasized throughout this movie. 

And then we get the second-act climax, where Winter Soldier ambushes our heroes in the highway. Jasper Sitwell dies in the process, and we get a particularly gripping sequence of car battle, followed by a shootout in the streets as Winter Soldier and his mercenaries hunt down our woefully under-equipped heroes. It ultimately boils down to a 1-v-1 between Captain America and Winter Soldier, including a particularly badass action sequence involving a knife. But after Winter Soldier's mask is ripped off, Captain America gasps in shock because the identity of Winter Soldier is... Bucky! His friend who died in the previous movie!

And the twist? Bucky doesn't even remember who Bucky is. It proves to be enough of a distraction for Brock Rumlow and STRIKE to come in and arrest Cap and his allies, but they are freed from their prison car by Maria Hill, who brings them to see Nick Fury, who's alive and had faked his death in the operating room. Captain America and his allies aren't particularly happy at being kept in the dark again, and I do like that while they see the necessity in taking down Hydra and Project Insight, they basically strong-arm Nick Fury into agreeing that they do things differently in the future, because all this spy stuff is what led to Hydra being in power in the first place. 

The final act is pretty cool, too, basically an extended infiltration sequence into the Triskelion as our heroes try to take out the Helicarriers. There's even a pretty cool plan going on here, with Black Widow disguising herself as one of the World Security Council members to spill Pierce's plans to the other WSC members. Nick Fury shows up and uses a backdoor to the SHIELD database -- his scarred-over eyeball, which is so cool! This ended up being the thing that the heroes decide to do, which is to leak every single piece of data in the SHIELD database into the world. There's a bit of an argument and a struggle -- with Pierce emphasizing how it's Nick Fury that taught him to 'make the hard choices' -- but ultimately Pierce kills most of the World Security Council, and Fury shoots him and leaves him to die. 

Of course, while this is going on, we've got a confrontation all over the Triskelion. Brock Rumlow and STRIKE try to enforce Alexander Pierce's Hydra rule, but even the technicians of SHIELD that are just working ends up resisting. Agent 13/Sharon Carter also ends up fighting against Brock a bit. Captain America and Falcon try to infiltrate the Helicarriers, but the Winter Soldier arrives as they're doing their 'replace the chips' deal, leading to a pretty intense fight. Falcon's wingsuit gets taken out of the fight disappointingly early on, although we did get a couple of thrilling flight scenes. Falcon gets to fight Brock Rumlow, though, so at least he's got an antagonist to contend with. 

And... and ultimately, the good guys win, of course. They stop the Helicarrier, Pierce gets killed, Rumlow gets a building dropped on him (he survives with scars) and Hydra is exposed to the public. But the huge climactic point is Steve Rogers faced against Winter Soldier. It's a badass superhero action scene, of course, but there's also a huge sense of guilt going on there. Throughout the movie, one of the underlying themes has been Steve trying his best to adjust in a world that feels so alien to him. Every aspect of his old life from World War II are either in a museum or, like poor old Peggy, no longer in a state to really talk to him. Even the state of the military and the spy life is so fucked up, and we've seen that while Steve is friendly to everyone, he's also not the most comfortable with the Avengers. Sure, Steve definitely made friends with Natasha and Sam in this movie, but Bucky? Bucky isn't only a friend from Steve's old life, but he also represents one of the few times in Steve's life that he failed. It's a chance to correct his mistake, and I love that Steve, even in trying to save the world, still refuses to fight Bucky to the death. I didn't particularly care for this moment back in 2014, but now? Knowing what happens to Bucky in Civil War, Infinity War and Falcon and the Winter Soldier? Yeah. It's a pretty damn strong moment. 

As the Helicarriers and the Triskelion are destroyed, Captain America falls into the river, and the Winter Soldier fishes him out. Freed from his Hydra masters, Winter Soldier basically just... disappears, revealed to be trying to learn more about himself in the post-credits scene. Then we get the montage showing the conclusion to this. SHIELD is disbanded, Natasha leaks all the SHIELD information to the public, and Nick Fury continues to fake his death and hides off to continue taking the fight against Hydra on his own. The movie ends in a pretty optimistic note, all things considered, keeping enough things open-ended (including a particularly on-the-nose teaser for Age of Ultron).

And... and yeah. It's ultimately just a summary of the movie, I know. But I really did enjoy all the themes being explored here. It did get admittedly somewhat preachy about 'spy stuff is bad!' near the end, but I also liked that they noted that when done by good people like Fury and Widow, spy stuff is sometimes necessary. And, well, considering this is a movie about Steve Rogers, it also highlights his 'I'm a good man trying to do good' mentality. Again, this is the movie that really made me like Steve Rogers as an actual character because, well, the MCU did the right thing trying to focus on him as a good person first and foremost instead of going for the 'patriotic flagman' which is something that most audiences outside of America would roll their eyes at. 

And... so many things in this movie is done well! Alexander Pierce is an excellently interesting villain with just enough backstory told to us in the movie for him to not feel too flat. Brock Rumlow and the brainwashed Bucky make for pretty great goon antagonists. Black Widow, Falcon, and to a lesser extent Nick Fury and Maria hill are also all juggled pretty well, and, as mentioned before, this is one of the few movies that actually allowed Natasha to show a fair chunk of characterization. The themes of this movie and the general pacing of the plot is handled well, and all the action scenes are thrilling. Again, this movie definitely deserves its place as one of the best offerings the MCU has to offer. 

Marvel Easter Eggs Corner:

• Post-Credits Scene: The mid-credits scene who off Baron Strucker and Dr. List, minor antagonists for the upcoming Age of Ultron, looking at two more assets Hydra has stored away -- Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch. The post-credits scene show Bucky going into the museum to learn more about his past. 
• Stan the Man: Stan Lee is the security guard who has the misfortune of being on guard when Steve Rogers decides to steal his WWII outfit. It's played for laughs but he totally got fired for that, huh. 
  
• Future Movies Foreshadowing: Agent Sitwell name-drops Stephen Strange several movies before he debuts in the MCU.
• Past Movie Continuity: Obviously, the events of Captain America: The First Avenger is mentioned a lot of times, especially in regards to Bucky and Arnim Zola. The deaths of Howard and Maria Stark, previously off-handedly mentioned in the Iron Man movies, is also expanded upon here as being caused by the Winter Soldier. Steve finds out about SHIELD weaponizing Hydra tech in The Avengers abroad the Helicarrier. After the events of The Avengers, Stark Tower is now known as Avengers Tower. Senator Stern returns from Iron Man 2, and Jasper Sitwell from Thor, where it's revealed that they were both Hydra agents all along. Tony Stark (Iron Man), Bruce Banner (Hulk) and President Ellis (from Iron Man 3) are part of the targets of Project Insight.
• Movie Superhero Codenames: Winter Soldier is consistently referred to as 'Winter Soldier' throughout the movie since his secret identity is a major part of the movie's plot. Sharon Carter is also called 'Agent 13' for the majority of the movie. Sam and Natasha did get referred to as "Falcon" and "Black Widow" a couple of times in the climax where it's treated like their codenames. Batroc the Leaper is just called 'Georges Batroc', while Brock Rumlow is never referred to as 'Crossbones'. 
• Favourite Action Scene: You'd think it's Captain America against like a dozen Hydra agents in the elevator, leading to him in a 1v1 fight against a Quinjet. But no, my favourite action scene in this one is Captain America versus Winter Soldier in the streets, with a particularly slick move where Bucky flips a knife mid-air. 
• Funniest Line: There are a couple, but my favourite is probably Nick Fury yelling at Falcon after a helicopter rescue that floor numbers aren't painted on the side of the building. 
• There are several shots of Winter Soldier prominently holding Captain America's shield in action scenes -- the comic-book Bucky would actually become Captain America for a time. 
• The Baxter Building, home to the Fantastic Four (who wasn't available to the MCU at the time of shooting this movie), can be glimpsed in the Project Insight scene although no member of the Fantastic Four is explicitly named. 
• "Operation: Zemo" can be seen on the Smithsonian exhibit, referencing the supervillain Baron Zemo. Though since a MCU version of Baron Zemo would show up later on with no relation to Cap's WWII career, this is probably non-canon now.

Movie Review: Thor: The Dark World

Thor: The Dark World [2013]

Here we go with the unfavourite black sheep of the MCU movies. Infamous for probably being one of the worst-rated movies among MCU's otherwise crowd-pleasing track record, Thor: The Dark World is... well, it's a confusing run. And both this and Iron Man 3 kind of burnt me out of rewatching/reviewing MCU movies for a while. But hey, here I am talking about it. Honestly, The Dark World isn't even terrible. It's just... very dry. A lot of the problems I think the original Thor had is amplified here, and it's even more noticeable now that the cast is already defined and there's no excuse for the rather scattershot lack of focus in this movie. 

One of the problems with Thor and The Dark World is that... well, frankly we're all here for the Norse god action. We want to see Thor fight against Malekith, lord of the dark elves, and his legion of shadow-wielding warriors. We want to see the backstory of the dark elves and how they relate to Asgard. But instead, half of the screentime is focused on the Earthen cast. And while the screentime division isn't quite as lopsided as Thor -- in no small part by bringing Jane Foster to Asgard -- any time we sit down with the Earth cast of Erik, Darcy and Darcy's intern it feels like the movie is grinding into a halt. And I realize that sounds pretty mean because Darcy is one of the funnier characters in the MCU and Erik Selvig is likable, but that's how the movie really feels. 

There's also the problem in that Malekith is one of the worst executed supervillains in these MCU movies. We have had (and will have) some flat or uninteresting villains in other movies, but Malekith is probably the only one that isn't even allowed to be entertaining. At least characters like Aldrich Killian or Ronan the Accuser were allowed to really ham it up with grandiose dialogue. Poor Christopher Eccleston isn't really allowed to do much, and it's made worse because the movie Malekith also has one of the most drab page-to-screen translations (the comic-book Malekith was so colourful!). Malekith the Accursed really doesn't get too much depth beyond 'ancient enemy of the Asgardians, now he wants a doomsday weapon'. The fact that the Dark Elves went from being, well, elves into essentially Star Wars aliens with fancy technological ships also felt bizarre in a setting where the main hero wields a magic hammer that shoots out lightning bolts. Thor has had some moments where the 'magic' of Asgard does look like some super-advanced science, particularly with their design of the Bifrost Bridge, but here the aesthetic of the newcomers feel less like they belong in a Thor run, and more like they belong in Guardians of the Galaxy. 

Malekith also has the misfortune in that he has to fight over screentime with the ever-popular Loki, who, of course, has became the fandom and the studio's darling after the pretty memorable appearances in Thor and The Avengers. And I don't blame them -- Tom Hiddleston's Loki is a great character and is very well realized. Loki's character arc is easily the best part of this movie, even! But that did come at the sacrifice of the movie losing its primary antagonist.

This movie (and the next one, Age of Ultron) apparently were some of the movies that went through some pretty heavy executive meddling in order to really market the next couple of movies, and there's definitely a slump in this phase of the MCU. I'm not here to try and dissect who dropped the ball, but I'm just thankful that they managed to pick it back up eventually. 

Anyway, we'll talk about this movie's story. We get a flashback of an ancient war between Allfather Bor and the dark elves of Svartalfheim, led by Malekith. Malekith wants to unleash the mighty weapon called the Aether to destroy the Nine Realms, but his army was routed by Bor, who sealed the Aether. Malekith, his lieutenant Algrim and a ship manage to escape destruction and hid in the darkness of space. Flash-forward to present day, and Thor is leading his buddies Sif, Fandral, Hogun and Volstagg in beating up space villains in the realm of Vanaheim, pacifying the Nine Realms while the Bifrost Bridge is being repaired. Also, not that the Warriors Three ultimately matter, but Hogun is left behind on Vanaheim for essentially the entire movie.

In London, Midgard, Jane Foster goes on a disastrous date (which was funny but really added nothing) before Darcy Lewis drags her into an abandoned building. Turns out a weird magical space-time continuum breaking portal has appeared, in the form of a weird portal with inconsistent teleportation powers. Darcy and her intern get into some funny antics (those car keys!), but Jane gets teleported into the stone column where Bor sealed the Aether, and the Aether infects her like a parasite. 

Jane disappearing into this realm causes Heimdall (who can't see her with his all-seeing vision) to finally send Thor to Midgard. And we get the reunion between Thor and Jane... and Jane's pissed about the whole 'you never called' thing, even after New York. Whoops! It's swept under the rug pretty quickly, though. The whole Aether thing causes Jane to unleash an explosion of energy that knocks back some policemen, and Thor brings Jane into Asgard where the magics medics of Asgard find that the Aether has bonded to Jane. Odin is also furious, not only because of the whole prophecy of the dark elves, but also because Thor has clearly fallen head-over-heels with a pretty mortal woman. 

As the strikethroughs have probably clued you in, I'm not the biggest fan of the really sci-fi feel of a lot of the aesthetics of this movie. I don't mind having pragmatic adaptations like the Bifrost in the first Thor movie, but a lot of these feel like they should be in Star Wars or Star Trek or Guardians of the Galaxy instead of a Thor movie. It feels like a bizarre disconnect, and unlike Thor: Ragnarok we don't even have the excuse that these are aliens instead of Nine-Realms-related people.

Also awakened by the Aether's activation is Malekith, who unleashes an invasion on Asgard with his spaceships. Malekith's minion Algrim infiltrates the prisoners from earlier and frees transforms into a 'Kursed', a super-powerful warrior. Loki is among the prisoners that were freed, and out of mischief, gives them some directions to allow them to cause the most havoc. 

This sequence is actually pretty cool, from an action movie perspective. Heimdall detecting a stealth ship and managing to single-handedly blow it up, only for the mothership to decloak; the CGI for the black hole grenades; Loki's little moment of mischief... and the final stand of Frigga. Frigga, Thor's mom, got a fair amount of screentime in this one talking to Odin, Thor, Jane and especially Loki, and she shows off that Loki's magics are inherited from her. As Frigga protects Jane, she ends up getting killed by Malekith. We get an actually well-done Viking funeral, before Odin orders everyone to defend Asgard. 

Thor, meanwhile, wants to take the fight to Malekith, and goes off to recruit Loki (who knows the 'secret ways' between realms) to do this. And I really do love this scene. Before, Loki is shown to be a pouty bastard in his cell whose only recourse is Frigga occasionally visiting him. And we get so many good scenes for Loki after Frigga's death. The voiceless sequence of a guard informing Loki, and the calm look he has -- which turns into him unleashing a telekinetic blast in his room once the guard is gone. Then him using an illusion to appear confident to Thor, before he dispels it to show him disheveled after clearly unleashing his frustration in the room... Thor notes that he doesn't trust Loki, but he trusts in his hatred and his desire for vengeance against Malekith.

And this part is pretty fun, as Thor and Loki bicker all the way from Asgard to Svartalfheim. Sif, Fandral and Volstagg buy them time as Thor and Loki take Jane away, and we get a pretty cool sequence where it seems that Loki has betrayed Thor to Malekith, slicing off his brother's hand. Malekith uses his dark elf powers to extract the Aether out of Jane... but this is what Thor is banking on, and the two brothers fight against Malekith. It's kind of weird that they were so sure that the process wouldn't kill Jane, but... okay. During this battle, Loki actually jumps in the way of a blow meant for his brother, and gets stabbed by Kurse, but manages to kill Kurse with his black hole grenade thing. 

And it's a pretty dramatic scene that almost makes you believe that Loki dies here. Him telling Thor that he did it for his brother but not Odin is even a pretty good way to go out -- he's had some huge daddy issues in Thor, and throughout this movie I think he's learned that he has some people in his family that he's not ashamed to fight and die for. Well, not as ashamed, anyway. It's honestly pretty neat, since we've seen that while Thor isn't the best brother, he was very adamant at trying to give Loki a second chance in Avengers, so Loki recognizing that enough to die for his brother is pretty well-done. Except that, well, we know Loki is the god of lies and mischief. You could almost believe it, though, since Loki has had his moment in the sun as the primary antagonist of two movies. The movie makes it pretty clear that Loki survives, as we see a scene of him disguised as an Asgardian scout, and later on he shows up in the final scene. 

But the rest of the movie goes off towards the rather... by-the-books finale, which drags on for a while. I really don't have much to say here There's also a sub-plot of Darcy getting Erik Selvig out of an asylum, and them just sort of plodding along talking about the Convergence. Thor and Jane meet up with them, and they basically manage to come up with these pillars to disrupt the Convergence, or something? Malekith shows up on Earth and is about to use the Aether to infect the Nine Realms, and then we get Thor and Aether-Malekith fighting through the portals. Malekith has huge cloud-manipulating powers thanks to the Aether. It's... it's neat to watch, and I won't disparage the action sequence, but ultimately Malekith is just kind of generically proclaiming doomsday stuff, and the humans teleport Malekith to Svartalfheim where he gets finally crushed by his own ship. 

Thor returns to Asgard, where he declines the offer to take the throne (which is another running subplot in the background) and talks about Loki's great sacrifice. 'Odin' allows Thor to return to Midgard to be with Jane -- which he does in the post-credits scene -- before revealing himself to the audience as Loki. Also, because we are really hammering home the Infinity Stone stuff, Volstagg and Sif later visit an alien called the Collector to deposit the Aether with him so that the Aether and Tesseract -- two Infinity Stones -- aren't cloes to each other. 

And ultimately, again, the movie itself is just unfocused. The Malekith, Aether and Convergence plot takes up the majority of the movie's focus, but Malekith himself isn't interesting at all and apparently a lot of backstory was left at the cutting room floor. The B-plots of Thor's romance with Jane is just barely competently done (Jane herself honestly isn't that interesting of a character), whereas the rest of the Midgardian cast is pretty much distraction. Meanwhile, the movie's strongest parts -- Frigga's sacrifice and Loki's eventual character development -- is basically sequestered to the second act and is only tangentially relevant to the Malekith/Aether plotline. Which, as I repeated multiple times... is kind of generic and the movie doesn't do a lot to elevate it above being a generic 'destroy the world' plotline. And, well... toss in that rather unmemorable final act which is essentially just a more muted version of Avengers but with portals, and it is kind of no surprise that The Dark World ends up feeling like a sub-par movie. There's a lot that I feel they wanted to do here, but it's all just boiled down to the bare bones. I wouldn't call the movie 'unwatchable' or 'terrible', because I still had fun with it, but I was definitely exhausted by the end of it. 

Marvel Easter Eggs Corner:

• Post-Credits Scene: This one has multiple. The mid-credits scene shows Sif and Volstagg putting the Aether as safekeeping with the Collector. The post-credits scene shows Thor arriving and reuniting with Jane; while the Jotunheim frost-beast chases some pigeons in London. 
• Stan the Man: Stan Lee is a patient in a mental ward who wants his shoe back from Erik Selvig. In a fun little gag, Stan Lee is listed as playing himself in the credits. 
• Chris Evans shows up as a cameo when Loki briefly transforms into Captain America to mock Thor. 
• Future Movies Foreshadowing: In addition to Loki impersonating Odin (which will be followed up in Thor: Ragnarok), this movie is perhaps the first that really sets off the Infinity Stones saga, identifying the Aether and the Tesseract as Infinity Stones and noting that it's dangerous to keep multiple stones close together. The Collector also makes an early appearance before his more major role in Guardians of the Galaxy. 
• Past Movie Continuity: Loki's behaviour that ended him in prison is, of course, the events of Thor and The Avengers. Erik Selvig was also driven insane in the events of The Avengers, and the Tesseract was brought to Asgard at the end of that movie as well. The destruction of the Bifrost in Thor is also briefly brought up a couple of times. Jotunheim's giant frost beast from Thor makes a couple brief cameos as the Convergence happens, and shows up in the post-credits scene. Volstagg does the "Another!" scene that is often-meme'd from Thor in the Asgardian banquet hall, showing that it's actually not impolite to do that in Asgard.
• Movie Superhero Codenames: Malekith's 'superhero name' is just his name. Algrim is mostly referred to by his name, though his transformation into 'one of the Kursed' is mentioned several times. I don't think he's ever actually called 'Kurse', though.
• Favourite Action Scene: Jeez, I don't know. I guess Thor and Malekith tumbling through portals? The two of them sliding off a glass building was particularly memorable. Heimdall one-shotting the dark elf ship is also very cool. 
• Funniest Line: "GOD BLESS AMERICAAaampphgh!"
• A Kronan shows up and gets shattered into rocks in the prologue. Kronans (or "Stone Men from Saturn") are the first-ever villains fought by Thor in the comics, and MCU fans would recognize them as the race that Korg from Thor: Ragnarok hail from. 
• During Erik's asylum rambling about the Convergence, "616 Universe" can be seen in the blackboard. Earth-616 is the designation of the mainstream/original comic-book Marvel universe. 
• Another thing written on that blackboard is "The Fault", a space-time rift formed in the War of Kings which connected Earth-616 to the 'Cancerverse'. 
• Thor and Sif mention the 'Battle of Harokin'. In the comics, Harokin was a warrior that served under Hela and fought Thor, before eventually betraying Hela. 
• The helmeted prisoner in Kurse's prison cell seems to be a nod to Kurse's comic-book appearance.

Movie Review: Iron Man 3

Iron Man 3 [2013]

Okay, this movie... it's a weird one, huh? It's branded as the first movie of the Marvel Cinematic Universe's "Phase Two", although it honestly feels more like an epilogue to "Phase One", rounding out perhaps the sequence in the Marvel Cinematic Universe that features Tony Stark as its heart and soul. And this movie is... it's honestly a weird one. It's probably one of the more 'episodic' movies in the MCU, and while we do get a lot of great acting moments, it's also probably the one that you could remove from the MCU lineup and don't really change a whole ton. And this movie is, as I gather, originally written as a possible 'out' in case actor Robert Downey Jr. decided to not continue with the rest of the MCU. Obviously he stuck around for much longer, but I remembered back in 2013 when the Avengers were just starting off and the marketing around Iron Man 3 skirted around the question of whether Tony Stark would remain with the rest of the MCU. 

I also remember this movie as being one that I really enjoyed when I first watched it in the theatres, but my opinion about it really kind of waned over the years. And unlike most of my MCU reviews, I think I'll just rip the band-aid off at the beginning of the episode -- it's the Mandarin twist. Now, I'm writing this in 2021, where we have the very welcome revelation that, hey, all the Mandarin in this movie is a huge impostor. We had the DVD short All Hail the King that revealed that a real, proper Mandarin exists, which finally shows up in Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings. And that's awesome. But then there's also the problem of the Mandarin as he's depicted here. I normally don't like to talk about this sort of topic, but the Mandarin stuff is worth noting.

Now the original concept of the Mandarin from the comics is something that's hard to bring into a live-action setting. Obviously you really can't have too much of the yellow peril tropes -- the Mandarin in the comics have been reinvented multiple times over the years into a far less racist character. But, rather obviously, out of fear of offending the Chinese market, they didn't go for a movie showing Tony Stark beating up a Chinese sorcerer in ancient emperor robes. That part's understandable. Hell, even casting the half-Indian Ben Kingsley as the 'Mandarin', and he's sold as a terrorist of ambiguous ethnicity? Okay, an interesting move, and Sir Ben Kingsley is an awesome actor that could definitely make it work. And then turns out that halfway through the movie, Ben Kingsley's Mandarin is "Trevor Slattery", an actor that's hired to play the role of the Mandarin, who's just a figurehead for the real villain of the movie to profit off of.

Which, by the way, is a pretty neat twist. But then turns out that Aldrich Killian walks around yelling that "I AM THE REAL MANDARIN!" at the climax of the movie and... okay, Guy Pearce does a pretty great job at playing Aldrich Killian. He was honestly not the most memorable villain, but the actor did a pretty good job at playing a smarmy businessman-Bond-villain character. But I dunno. The fact that they race-lifted a character called 'The Mandarin' twice is kind of bizarre. And for all the concessions that they did for the Chinese market. Wouldn't a better way to do so be by casting someone ethnically Chinese? It's bizarre. It's like they jump through all of these hoops just to get 'The Mandarin' on screen, but the eventual product is kind of so far removed for the sake of a meta-twist that it ended up really feeling bizarre... and at this point, wouldn't it be better if they had just adapted a character like Ezekiel Stane or something instead? I dunno. 

Toss in the conclusion of the movie that ended with Tony Stark blowing up all of his armours as a grand gesture that he can still be Iron Man without the armour... something that the MCU sort of handwaves quietly as 'he got over it' when Tony shows up not only with a fancy new armour in the next movie. It makes the climax of this movie feel a lot less impactful than it had been in 2013.

That said, though, ignoring all that... the movie is a relatively solid standalone entry. The movie is relatively self-contained while building up to its own plot. We get a brief prologue of douchebag pre-Iron-Man Tony Stark being kind of a jackass to people in a convention in Switzerland, where he meets a bunch of the side-characters that will be relevant in this movie. Scientist Maya Hansen, who is creating a regenerative treatment called Extremis, done on plants; as well as awkward geeky fanboy nerd Aldrich Killian, who is founding a company called Advanced Idea Mechanics (A.I.M.). Stark blows off the latter and was pretty rude to the former, though he did help Maya perfect Extremis. 

Then we flash-forward to around half a year after the events of The Avengers, where we move into easily the strongest part of the movie -- Tony Stark's breakdowns. The movie originally was supposed to adapt Tony's comic-book 'Demon in a Bottle' alcoholism storyline, but it was changed into dealing with a lot of PTSD after the whole alien-fighting thing, and this is easily one of the best parts of the movie for me. Too often we jump into these superhero shows (and frankly, most works of fiction) talking about explosions and aliens and superheroes, while in any realistic setting a civilian like Tony that is tossed into such a high-tension situation would be suffering from something like this. As someone who personally had suffered from panic attacks and anxiety, it was pretty surprising and very welcome to see mental health addressed in a huge-budget superhero movie. The panic attack that Tony suffers while signing a picture for a young fan; the obsession that Tony feels as he throws himself into work and obsession in making new models of Iron Man suits, putting some friction in his relationship with Pepper...

And while the middle part of the movie where Tony pals around with the little kid (he's called Harley Keener; I genuinely forgot his name and I watched the movie less than a week before writing this review) I actually do like the sequence in principle. Him bonding with a young geek and being a fatherly figure -- in a way that he thinks Howard never had been to him -- is actually cute. It's just paced so slowly and takes up so long that makes it feel like we probably could've done with a bit less of it. 

There's also a less-obvious underlying theme of Tony thinking that all he can do is be Iron Man. The suit is what put him in the same level as international spy networks, super-soldiers and literal alien gods of thunder. And relatively quickly into the movie, he loses almost everything. His house gets blown and sunk to the bottom of the ocean, his newest suit gets broken, and even faithful old JARVIS is taken offline. And on principle, it's kind of cool to see Tony basically reinvent everything wholesale with his ingenuity and a bunch of MacGyver'd gadgets brought from a 7/11. And that, I guess, makes him feel super-confident that he can be a superhero without being Iron Man... a confidence boost that makes sense for Tony's character development. It's just that, well, we all know that the MCU moved forward with him still being Iron Man, which just kind of makes the ending of this movie pretty weird. 

Anyway, the plot of this movie! A series of bombings is caused by a mysterious terrorist called the Mandarin, who is so far-reaching that he could even put a number into President Warren Ellis' phone. We get some brief sub-plots with James Rhodes being re-branded as America's "Iron Patriot" (a title that's actually associated with Norman Osborn in the comics), while Aldrich Killian tries to talk to CEO Pepper in seeking a deal with AIM. Meanwhile, good ol' Happy Hogan goes off to investigate the bombings and ends up being injured heavily and put into a coma. All this ends up pissing Tony Stark and in the move that everyone who watched this movie agrees is the dumbest thing to do, goads the Mandarin into attacking his home on live television. 

(And since we know that Tony has the 'House Party Protocol' literally in his basement', it's kind of dumb that he never thinks of ordering JARVIS to deploy it).

And attack Tony Stark's home is what the Mandarin does, courtesy of missiles attached to news helicopters. The action scene is pretty cool, actually, with the capabilities of Tony's Mark 42 -- an armour who can split apart into individually flying pieces -- shown in a pretty cool sequence as it rescues Pepper. And at one point JARVIS takes control of a glove to pull Tony out from being buried under rubble. 

But then the unconscious Tony ends up flying on a flight plan and lands in Tennessee, where his armour gives out and we get the aforementioned sub-plot with him befriending little Harley while he continues to investigate the explosions connected to the Mandarin's attacks. I actually do like the reasoning here -- the Mandarin's organization, tied to AIM, has been experimenting on soldiers using the Extremis program to regenerate their limbs... but many of these Extremis subjects end up blowing up when their bodies reacted badly with the Extremis. And the subsequent terrorist speeches by the Mandarin is essentially an elaborate cover-up. 

We get the arrival of several stable Extremis warriors -- Erik Savin and Ellen Brandt -- and their Extremis powers essentially means that they can heat their bodies up and have super-strength. Which... okay, sure, it makes for pretty easy CGI, I imagine. Again, a lot of the actions sequences here basically show off that Tony can be innovative, and he manages to kill Brandt without a suit and escape from Savin. Also, turns out that Maya Hansen, who's hanging out with Pepper, is evil, and she and Aldrich Killian (who also has Extremis powers) kidnap Pepper. Also also, Iron Patriot gets lured into a trap, and AIM basically steals the armour. Again, all the set-up to the Extremis plot is actually pretty well-done!

We get one of the two signature action scenes of the movie at around this point, where Tony Stark, armed in nothing but improvised weaponry, infiltrates the Mandarin's mansion and basically Assassin's Creed's his way and beats up a bunch of goons. Killian captures Stark, and kills Maya Hansen when she starts to get turned ever-so-slightly to Stark's side, and injects Pepper with Extremis. Stark summons his armour, and confronts 'the Mandarin'. Turns out that 'the Mandarin' is a British actor called Trevor Slattery. And... and okay, Sir Ben Kingsley is absolutely hilarious as Trevor. I don't actually have any complaints here. 

Stark and Rhodes escape, and find out that Killian plans to attack President Ellis on Air Force One -- the vice president is an ally of Killian, and would take over to be a puppet leader. We get a rather well-executed creepy scene where Savin, wearing the Iron Patriot armour, basically just infiltrates his way into Air Force One, kidnaps the president, and punches a hole in the airplane. Stark kills Savin with a uni-beam, before we get the elaborate scene of him catching every single person that got jettisoned out of the airplane... I'm not sure whether the 'I will electrify your muscles' excuse would really work, but okay, I'll buy it. 

Then we get the final battle, where Stark and Rhodes arrive in an impounded oil tanker, a pretty cool final battle location. Stark plays his trump card, the House Party Protocol, summoning the rest of his Iron Man suits and... and you know what? It's very, very cool to see all the suits swoop in one by one, facing off against Killian's army of Extremis soldiers. None of the suits really stay on screen for too much, but each of them has a unique design and name (that is really generous to the accompanying toyline and media) and I certainly appreciate that. Tony just swoops in and out of his many many suits as he fights the Extremis soldiers, before eventually getting into a confrontation with Killian and the captive Pepper. 

And... okay. It's an action sequence showing off like thirty-something Iron Man suits with unique designs shooting repulsor blasts at burning super-soldiers on an oil rig. I know the story and acting is more important and this review focuses more on that, but there will always be a small part of me that gets excited over the huge giant robot action scene. 

(Meanwhile, Rhodes frees President Ellis and while Rhodes does get a couple of cool action scenes taking down Extremis soldiers, he really doesn't do anything cool with the Iron Patriot armour, huh?)

Ultimately, we get an action scene of Tony versus Killian, and there's also a brief sequence where Pepper falls down to her seeming death before it's revealed that she survives like ten minutes later. Killian gets killed by Pepper mid-rant, and then we get the infamous finale where Tony blows up all of his suits as a sign of his love. And... and we get an epilogue that basically wraps up everything in the Iron Man movies. The vice president gets arrested; Happy wakes up from his coma; Pepper's Extremis condition gets cured almost off-screen; Tony's whole 'shrapnel around his heart' condition is cured; and Tony drives off into the sunset with the triumphant note that even without his tech and suits, he will always be Iron Man. 

And, overall... I don't know. Iron Man 3 has a lot of things that are good going on for it. The PTSD stuff is well done and Robert Downey Jr's acting is absolutely excellent whether he's dropping one-liners or having a panic attack. The investigation for the Extremis/Mandarin conspiration is actually done pretty well. Action scene wise, the House Party Protocol and Tony's Solid Snake assault on the Miami compound are great. Plus we got a lot of great visuals with the Mark 42. But Killian is ultimately kind of a flat one-note villain that's only memorable because of Guy Pearce's performance, and a lot of the side-cast like Pepper, Rhodes and Happy honestly feel like they're just there to be rescued, which makes me feel like they certainly could've done better. All in all it's honestly still a very solid movie and I spent an enjoyable evening watching it, it's just that... well, over time I feel like I ended up losing a lot of enthusiasm for this movie. A lot of people like this movie a lot more than I do and I can't blame them! I just can't really get behind this one, is all. 

(This took a bit of a while to publish. I basically waited until I've done all the reviews for the Phase Two movies and it took me quite a while before they're all ready for me to publish sequentially. I actually wrote this all the way back in April or March, because I thought Iron Man 3 was a Phase One movie.)

(I was about to do a Black Widow review in July, but ended up putting off watching the movie and I think ultimately I'll just review it whenever I have the time to)

Marvel Easter Eggs Corner:

• Post-Credits Scene: Tony Stark is talking to Bruce Banner about the events of this episode, treating Bruce as his therapist. 
  
• Stan the Man: Stan Lee is an overly excited judge of a beauty pageant.
• Future Movies Foreshadowing: This movie was meant to be a way for the studio to write out Iron Man, so there really isn't much -- other than maybe some vague similarities with the Iron Legion in Age of Ultron (which is frankly kind of reaching) this movie doesn't actually build up anything for the future movies. And there's the Mandarin, of course, but it's clear that they weren't planning for the version that showed up in Shang-Chi.
• Past Movie Continuity: Ho Yinsen gets a cameo in the prologue, and in Iron Man Yinsen had noted that he met Tony Stark in a conference in Switzerland. Trevor's Mandarin wears the same ring that Raza of the Ten Rings wears in Iron Man. And, of course, the events of Avengers is the catalyst for Tony's PTSD. 
• Movie Superhero Codenames: 'The Mandarin' is spoken multiple times, though it's mainly used to refer to Trevor Slattery's fake Mandarin persona. Aldrich calls himself the Mandarin at the final battle, though. Rhodes also gets a rebranding into 'Iron Patriot', which is spoken out multiple times in the movie. Many of Tony's suits are references to suits he wears in the comics. Eric Savin ("Coldblood") and Jack Taggert ("Firepower") never get their names spoken out loud, however. Ellen Brandt in the comics is the ex-wife of Man-Thing, but she doesn't have a codename. 
• Favourite Action Scene: House Party Protocol, natch.
• Funniest Line: "Whoa, whoa, whoa, bloody 'ell, bloody 'ell." I don't like what they did with the Mandarin, but Ben Kingsley's performance is golden.
• Happy and Pepper briefly name-drop someone called 'Bambi'. In the comics, Bambi Arbogast is Tony Stark's secretary.
• The circular basement with a series of armours is a homage to one of the key visuals from the '90's Iron Man cartoon. Various armours are references to specific looks in the comics, either by name or by appearance. Most popularly, 'Igor' is based on the Hulkbuster armour from the comic; though the MCU's Hulkbuster Armour would debut in Age of Ultron. 
• The whole Extremis storyline is very loosely based on the Extremis arc in the comics. Aldrich Killian and Maya Hansen are characters that originated and mostly limited to that arc (Killian dies in the same issue he debuted in). President Ellis borrows his name from Warren Ellis, the writer of the comic-book arc. 
• Happy being put in a coma is a reference to his comic-book counterpart's death, where comic-book Happy was put in a coma and eventually died after protecting Tony. This Happy, thankfully, survives.