The MCU Phase 1 – Proving It Could Work

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Phase 1: Proving It Could Work |
Phase 2: Finding the Formula |
Phase 3: The Payoff |
Phase 4: The MCU Becomes the MSHEU |
Phase 5: The MCU Pushes the Message |
Phase 6: The Reset

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1. Iron Man (2008)

► Read the full review of Iron Man (2008)

“I am Iron Man.”

Everything the franchise became is present in the first twenty minutes and none of it looks like a plan. A weapons manufacturer is captured by people using his own products, builds an escape in a cave, and comes home understanding what he has been doing for a living. That is a complete film about a specific man and it needs no universe behind it.

Robert Downey Jr. was a risk the studio had to be argued into, and the casting is the single most consequential decision in modern blockbuster filmmaking. He improvised heavily, Jon Favreau let him, and the result is a superhero who talks like a person rather than a poster. The final press conference works because Downey plays the admission as impulse instead of resolve.

What separates it from what came later is scale. The threat is one man in a larger suit, the stakes are a single arms deal, and the film never suggests that the world is ending. A story about a person changing his mind is enough, and Phase 1 believed that for six films.

The cave sequence is the reason the whole thing works and it is almost entirely procedural. Two men build something out of salvage across weeks, with a deadline neither controls, and the film shows the work. Yinsen is a real character with his own reason for being there, and his death is the only thing in the picture that changes Stark permanently.

Jeff Bridges gets less credit than he deserves. Obadiah Stane is not a rival genius, he is the man who has been running the business while Stark got the credit, and his resentment is entirely legible. The scene where he takes the arc reactor out of Stark’s chest is the most frightening moment in Phase 1, because it is quiet and personal and involves no powers at all.

Watching it now, the strangest quality is how little it points anywhere. There is no post-credits obligation baked into the story, no character introduced for a later slot, and no dialogue explaining a larger plan. It was made by people who wanted this film to be good, on the assumption that nothing else might follow.

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2. The Incredible Hulk (2008)

► Read the full review of The Incredible Hulk (2008)

“Don’t make me hungry. You wouldn’t like me when I’m hungry.”

The forgotten one, and the reassessment is overdue. Louis Leterrier made a fugitive thriller rather than a superhero film, opening with Banner already in hiding in Brazil, already fluent in the discipline of not being found, with the origin delivered in the credits because the audience already knows it.

Edward Norton plays Banner as a man managing a medical condition, and that reading is more frightening than the anger metaphor the character usually gets. He counts breaths, he watches a heart monitor, and the horror is procedural. The later recasting removed that entirely in favor of a man who has made peace with it, which is a smaller idea.

Tim Roth’s Blonsky is the other thing it gets right. He is a soldier who wants what Banner has and cannot understand why anybody would refuse it, which makes the final fight an argument between two attitudes to the same power rather than a collision of two effects.

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3. Iron Man 2 (2010)

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“I have successfully privatized world peace.”

The first film in the run with visible homework in it, and the point where the machinery starts to show. Nick Fury, Black Widow, a briefcase full of setup, and a plot that pauses regularly to establish something a later film will need.

What holds it up is Stark himself. He is dying, he is drinking, he is behaving appallingly, and the film is genuinely interested in a man who has decided that being admired is a substitute for saying goodbye. The party sequence is unpleasant in a way the franchise stopped permitting itself.

Sam Rockwell is the underrated element. Justin Hammer is not a dark reflection or an evil genius, he is a mediocre competitor who wants to be Stark and lacks the ability, and playing the antagonist as professionally jealous is a far more useful idea than most of the villains that followed.

Mickey Rourke’s Vanko is the structural problem. He has a genuine grievance, a father who died poor while somebody else’s father took the credit, and the film gives him about four scenes to establish it before parking him in a workshop for an hour. Two antagonists in one picture and neither gets enough room, which is a pattern the franchise repeated for fifteen years.

The Senate hearing is the best sequence and shows what the film could have been. A man who has privatized world peace, in front of a committee that cannot make him do anything, being right and insufferable simultaneously. That is a whole movie, and the picture keeps leaving it to service a briefcase.

The 5 is fair and it is a specific 5. This is the first entry where you can feel the enterprise being managed, where scenes exist to place objects in other films, and where the protagonist’s arc competes for room with administration. Everything that eventually went wrong is visible here in small.

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4. Thor (2011)

► Read the full review of Thor (2011)

“This drink, I like it. Another!”

Kenneth Branagh was an eccentric hire and the correct one. He treats Asgard as a court, the succession as a dynastic problem, and the family as a Shakespearean arrangement of a father, two sons and a secret, and the register holds because he never signals that any of it is silly.

The exile structure is what makes it work. Thor loses everything in the first act and spends the film as a man with no power in a small New Mexico town, which forces the character to be interesting before he is allowed to be impressive.

Tom Hiddleston’s Loki is the discovery. He is not a villain who wants power, he is a son who finds out what he is and cannot survive the information, and the film gives him a genuine grievance that the audience can follow. Almost every good thing the franchise did with him afterward is drawn from this performance.

Branagh shoots Asgard with canted angles throughout, which was mocked at the time and is the correct instinct. A realm that is meant to feel like a different order of thing should not be filmed like a boardroom, and the tilted frames make the palace scenes read as unstable, which is exactly what the succession plot requires.

The New Mexico material is where the film earns its 8. A god of thunder walking into a pet shop and demanding a horse is funny, and the humor comes from the character being entirely sincere rather than from anybody making a joke. Thor never once acknowledges that his situation is absurd, and that commitment is what makes it land.

Anthony Hopkins is doing more than the part needed. Odin is a man who lied to a child for a thousand years for reasons he believed were sound, and the throne room confrontation is played as a father who has run out of explanations. The films after this reduced him to a plot device and the reduction cost them something.

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5. Captain America: The First Avenger (2011)

► Read the full review of Captain America: The First Avenger (2011)

“I don’t like bullies. I don’t care where they’re from.”

The best film in Phase 1 and one of the two or three best in the entire franchise. Joe Johnston made a 1940s adventure serial in earnest, with the period design, the propaganda tour, the Howling Commandos montage and a hero whose defining quality is established before he has any physical ability at all.

The grenade scene is the whole film. A small man throws himself onto a live grenade to protect people he has known for a week, and Erskine has already told us the point: the serum amplifies what is there. Everything afterward is a consequence of a character established in about ninety seconds.

What gives it weight is the ending. He wins, and it costs him everything and everybody, and the last scene is a man waking up seventy years later having lost his entire world. A superhero film that concludes on grief was not obvious in 2011 and almost nothing since has been willing to do it.

The propaganda tour is the sequence that separates this from every other origin. He gets the serum, and the government makes him sell bonds in a costume on a stage with dancers, because a man who can lift a motorcycle is more useful as a poster than as a soldier. It is a genuinely cynical idea sitting inside an earnest film, and the picture is smart enough not to comment on it.

Peggy Carter is written as a professional rather than as a prize. Hayley Atwell plays somebody with her own authority who is better at her job than most of the men around her, and the relationship works because it is built on competence recognized in both directions. Almost nothing in the franchise has managed that since.

Johnston had made The Rocketeer twenty years earlier and this is the same film with a larger budget and a better script. The 1940s serial register is sustained without irony for two hours, the Hydra design is genuinely sinister, and the montage of the Commandos taking bases is the only part of the film that plays like a comic book, which is a deliberate contrast with everything around it.

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6. The Avengers (2012)

► Read the full review of The Avengers (2012)

“If we can’t protect the Earth, you can be damn well sure we’ll avenge it.”

The film that proved the whole idea, and the achievement is structural rather than spectacular. Six protagonists arrive from five separate films with established personalities, and none of them is diminished to make room for the others.

Joss Whedon’s solution is to spend the middle hour on conflict rather than teamwork. The helicarrier sequence is an hour of people who do not like each other arguing in rooms, and by the time they finally cooperate the audience has been made to want it. The team-up is a payoff, not a premise.

The New York battle still works because the geography is legible throughout. You always know where each character is, what they are doing and why, and the single tracking shot connecting all six is the clearest statement of what the film had accomplished. Every subsequent third act in this franchise is trying to be this and most of them forgot that clarity was the point.

Loki is the right antagonist for this specific story because he is not a threat to any of them individually. He is a manipulator, his weapon is division, and his plan works for most of the running time. The scene where he explains what he is doing to Black Widow, and she turns it around on him, is the best written exchange in Phase 1.

The death that turns the film is engineered and it is engineered well. Coulson had appeared across four films doing small administrative things, which made him the one character the audience knew without ever having thought about him, and Whedon spends that carefully constructed indifference at exactly the right moment.

The 8.5 is honest about what it is. This is an assembly job of enormous skill, it resolves in a hole in the sky with an army pouring out of it, and the template for that third act became the default for a decade. What holds up is the middle hour, which is people in rooms, and the discipline of never letting a joke undercut something the film needs.