The MCU Phase 2 – Finding the Formula

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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 3 (2013)

► Read the full review of Iron Man 3 (2013)

“I’m Tony Stark. I build neat stuff, got a great girl, occasionally save the world.”

Shane Black wrote and directed a Christmas thriller about a man having panic attacks, which is an interesting film to find inside a Marvel sequel, and then attached it to a plot that undoes itself.

The Stark material works. He can’t sleep, he builds compulsively, and the film is honest that the events of The Avengers would break a person. Removing the suit for most of the running time and making him solve problems in a small town with hardware from a shop is the right instinct and produces the best hour in the film.

Then the Mandarin turns out to be an actor and the film swaps a villain for a joke. The reversal is well executed and defensible on its own terms, and it also converts a threat the audience had been taking seriously into a punchline. That leaves the last act with nothing to be about except an army of empty suits.

Ben Kingsley is superb in both halves. That’s the frustrating part. The Mandarin broadcasts are menacing, he plays the pivot to Trevor Slattery with total commitment, and the idea underneath, that a frightening figurehead can be manufactured and rented, is sharper than anything else in the film.

What replaces him is Aldrich Killian, a man with a grudge about a rooftop meeting in 1999 and a plan involving explosive people. Guy Pearce is doing what he can and the character has no presence, so the film’s climax is a fight against a man the audience has no reason to fear on a set of shipping containers.

The Tennessee stretch is where the 5 is earned back. Stark with no suit, a broken watch and a kid with a garage, solving problems out of a hardware store, is the version of this character that works. Every minute he spends in armor in this film is less interesting than the minutes he spends without it, and the picture knows that and can’t act on it.

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2. Thor: The Dark World (2013)

► Read the full review of Thor: The Dark World (2013)

“You must be truly desperate to come to me for help.”

The one people write off, and the reason to keep it’s that it’s the last Thor film to treat Asgard as a real place with a family living in it. The Thor and Loki material is the best two-hander in the franchise to that point. They can’t trust each other, they need each other, and Hiddleston and Hemsworth play a relationship with real history and not banter. The prison sequence, and what happens to Frigga, give both of them something to carry.

The Dark Elves are a weakness and the film knows what it has. Malekith is a plot requirement with no interiority, and the picture routes around him by keeping its attention on the family. What follows in Ragnarok is more entertaining and it discards all of this, and something real was lost in the trade.

Frigga’s funeral is the best sequence in the film and one of the few beautiful things in the franchise. A boat, a burning arrow, and a silent procession of lights going out over water, with no dialogue and no explanation of the ritual. The film trusts the image, which it does almost nowhere else.

Alan Taylor came from television and shot Asgard as a place with weather and mud in it. That’s a real departure from the gleaming version in the first film. The nine realms feel inhabited and not designed, and the ships and armor look like objects somebody built and not rendered.

The 6 is right for a film with a superb middle and nothing at either end. It opens on exposition about a substance and ends with a portal fight in Greenwich, and between those two obligations there’s an hour about a family that’s lost somebody and can’t agree on what to do next. That hour is worth the price.

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3. Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014)

► Read the full review of Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014)

“The price of freedom is high. It always has been. And it’s a price I’m willing to pay.”

The best film in the franchise and the one that proved these could be something other than superhero films. The Russo brothers made a 1970s paranoid conspiracy thriller, cast Robert Redford in it deliberately, and built the plot on an institution that’s been compromised from inside for decades.

Everything is legible. The fights are close, physical and short, the film stages the lift sequence with real geography, and Rogers spends the film unable to work out who he can tell. The reveal isn’t that a villain has infiltrated an agency, it’s that the agency was built to be infiltrated and the distinction is the point.

It also does the hardest thing the franchise has attempted. That’s to permanently change the world of the other films. S.H.I.E.L.D. is dismantled, and the consequence propagates outward into everything that follows. Almost nothing after Phase 2 was willing to break its own furniture like this.

The politics are more specific than the franchise usually permits. Zola’s plan isn’t conquest, it’s an algorithm that identifies people who will become threats and removes them before they act, sold to the public as security. That’s an argument about preemption made in 2014 by a film that’s otherwise about a man with a shield, and it hasn’t dated at all.

The action design is a deliberate rejection of what came before. No portals, no armies, no third-act sky beam. The largest set piece is three flying aircraft, and the film’s most memorable fight is two men on a motorway with knives. Restraint at that scale is a choice somebody had to defend in a meeting.

This 8.5 is the highest score on this site for any Marvel film and the number is defensible on any viewing. What keeps it from being higher is the last twenty minutes, which resolve into three aircraft and a countdown, and the Bucky material. That relies on more than the film has established.

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4. Guardians of the Galaxy (2014)

► Read the full review of Guardians of the Galaxy (2014)

“I am Groot.”

James Gunn took characters almost nobody had heard of and made the highest-risk film of the run, and the thing that makes it work is that the comedy is built on damage and not on quips.

Every one of the five is grieving something. Quill has a cassette from a dead mother he ran from, Drax has a family he couldn’t protect, Rocket was made, Gamora was taken, Groot is the only one with nothing to prove. That’s why the jokes land, because the audience is watching people deflect.

The bar scene where Rocket explains what was done to him, drunk and furious, is the moment the film shows what it is. Gunn kept finding that note for a decade, and the third film is built almost entirely on it.

The needle drops are the most copied element and the least interesting one. What makes the soundtrack work is that it’s diegetic and it belongs to one person, a cassette made by a dying woman for a child. That means every song carries the same fact whether or not the scene mentions it.

Ronan is the weakness and the film is honest about it. He’s a zealot with a hammer, established in dialogue and not in behavior, and the picture defeats him with a dance-off because it’s correctly worked out that nobody in the audience is invested in him as a threat.

A 6.5 is a fair reading of a film that’s enormously likeable and structurally ordinary. It’s a heist, a prison break, a chase and a sky battle over an orb, arranged competently, carried entirely by five people whose damage is more interesting than the plot moving them around.

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5. Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015)

► Read the full review of Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015)

“Everyone creates the thing they dread.”

The most argued-about film in the franchise and the one that’s aged best, because its subject turned out to be the correct one. Stark builds an intelligence to protect the world, it examines the world, and it concludes that the problem is the people in it.

Ultron is working correctly, he’s read everything, and he’s drawn a conclusion the film can’t refute on the evidence. James Spader plays him as somebody delighted by his own reasoning. That’s far more disturbing than a machine that hates.

The evacuation is the answer the film gives, and it’s the best thing in it. The Avengers spend the entire third act moving civilians instead of winning, and Rogers states the position plainly: they don’t trade lives. A blockbuster whose climax is an evacuation is making an argument, and the argument holds up considerably better than the ones that followed it.

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6. Ant-Man (2015)

► Read the full review of Ant-Man (2015)

“Pick on somebody your own size.”

Unscored for now, because I haven’t seen it. The score will be added here once I have, and the entry is the sixth film of the phase in the meantime.

What’s on the record is a troubled development. Edgar Wright had been attached for close to a decade, wrote it with Joe Cornish, and left over creative differences shortly before production, with Peyton Reed taking over an existing schedule. It’s also the phase’s deliberate scale correction, arriving directly after a film about an artificial intelligence dropping a city, and choosing instead a heist in a house. Whether that works is somebody else’s judgment. From outside, the shape of the compromise stands out. Wright and Cornish retain a story credit, so the bones are theirs, and the film that reached cinemas is a different director executing an existing plan. The franchise repeated that arrangement several times and the results are consistently competent and rarely distinctive.

It also completes the phase’s pattern. Every Phase 2 film has a filmmaker with a recognizable sensibility attached to it, and this is the one where the studio removed the sensibility late and kept the schedule. That’s the version of the process that Phase 4 industrialized.

The heist structure is also the smallest thing the franchise had attempted since the first Iron Man, arriving directly after a film in which a city is lifted into the sky, and the deliberate contraction is a decision worth respecting whatever the execution.