Release date order.
Skip the non D+ shows. (The Netflix shows are often really good but aren’t really part of the main universe.)
Don’t neglect What If? which is really good.
You didn’t watch Endgame?? It seems strange to get that far and just give up.
Yeah, release date order, D+ shows only for starters.
I liked Agent Carter and all the leads (it has Hayley and young Tony Stark and Jarvis.) And I like 1940s stuff in general. But honestly you can skip it if you just want “the MCU story,” as it doesn’t add anything major to that. (Despite everyone wanting it to show the founding of SHIELD, it never got that far.)
You can probably skip the Incredible Hulk movie, too. I’ve never felt the urge to rewatch it after seeing it in theaters back in the day. (Edit - though wait it’s on HBO Max? Maybe I’ll give it a spin …)
The most important advice I can give is to go in with the correct mindset: set aside “cultural awareness and referential experience” while you’re watching. This isn’t homework, these are the definition of popcorn flicks. If they aren’t working for you as action-packed fun, or if you get burned out on them, set 'em aside. No point in watching things you don’t actually like “just to stay caught up.” Not that I would know anything about that. (cough post 1983 Star Wars cough)
No. If it’s a movie in the canon, I’m watching it. Not sure some of y’all get it.
At minimum, I’m watching them to be able to know that I’ve watched them. That’s why the idea of skipping just one movie is such a total nonstarter to me here as a suggestion. It’d be like trying to run a triathlon, getting 100 yards from the finish line, and deciding to stop.
The spiderman movies aren’t on D+ either, more’s the pity.
It’s not, like, a principled stand or something. I just honestly haven’t cared enough to bother to find a way to watch it.
Years ago, a friend of mine wanted to get into Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and he asked me which episodes he could skip (he just wanted the essential ones). I reluctantly gave him a few episodes he could pass on. Then a while later, he came back and went, “Why did you let me skip those episodes?!?”
But yeah I agree: If you’re doing a 24-movie cycle anyways, don’t skip the second one!
No problem, just wondering. It seems like a weird stopping point is all…or maybe it’s the best stopping point!
It’s only technically in the canon. They pretty much threw everything from that movie out after they made it. The actor who plays the Hulk (Norton) was replaced, his love interest is never seen or mentioned again, etc. The only thing that remains is William Hurt as General Ross becomes a side character in future movies. And the bad guy shows up for a cameo in a recent movie, that’s it.
Technical, shmechnical. ;)
It’s in the canon. And so even with all that, I think it will be interesting to compare Norton and his cast and this movie to future movies that have The Hulk character in it.
I definitely like the replacement better. Norton was fine, but eh. Ditto for the other big actor replacement they did in the Iron Man movies.
But there’s a ton in the Hulk they just discarded. The whole thing about his heart rate. They set up another bad guy that is never mentioned again, etc. But Downey Jr. shows up for 10 seconds as Stark, so it’s Canon!
Technically the Ed Norton Hulk film is a direct sequel to the Ang Lee film with Eric Bana in it.
Let’s get started with a movie. I’ve seen Iron Man!
Which, ah, as noted in the first post, I’d already seen. But that was in a theater in 2008 and I kind of don’t remember lots of it. And also – I should clear this now – there will be spoilers!! Probably. I mean, almost surely. So yeah, if you happen across this nonsense and don’t want to be spoiled, please don’t read these. Ok, let’s do this thing.
1. Iron Man (2008, with Robert Downey Jr, Gwyneth Paltrow, Jeff Bridges; directed by Jon Favreau)
One of the advantages to watching these movies in release date order, I realize now, is being able to place them within the context of their time and place upon release. So as I’m watching this first movie, the main thing I’m struck by is how easily so much of this could’ve gone so far, far wrong.
And here in 2022, we have a really good analog for what “far far wrong” might mean. Remember about 5 or 6 years back when Universal announced their “Dark Universe”? In case you don’t, the plan was for Universal to have their own “universe” of related characters and films based around their classic monster movie franchises of the 1930s, '40s and '50s. The plan revolved around reviving Dracula, Frankenstein’s monster (Javier Bardem was signed to play it), The Invisible Man (Johnny Depp was set for that), The Creature from the Black Lagoon, etc. etc.
And then the first movie, The Mummy, with a huge budget and big names involved (Tom Cruise, Russell Crowe) was an absolute dirty diaper stinker of a film. Launched into a world in which Twilight movies existed, The Mummy failed completely, both critically and commercially and Universal pulled the plug on that whole “Dark Universe” thing.
And I’d argue Iron Man came into being in a much harsher environment. The idea of some kind of serialized, related film “universe” really hadn’t happened that much or to the degree new Marvel Studios honcho Kevin Feige was envisioning. And Iron Man was launched into a world where the godawful Fantastic Four, Daredevil, Elektra, and even the iffy, up-and-down quality of the X-Men had come out in the immediate past.
Plus, the star of Iron Man wasn’t exactly tearing it up, box office wise at that point. Yes, Robert Downey Jr had been in a very good movie right before Iron Man – 2007’s Zodiac, where he’s just electric on-screen. But just prior to that, he’d had a very supporting role in a Disney “Shaggy Dog” movie, billed beneath Tim Allen and Craig Kilborn (You know your career has tanked completely when you’re billed beneath Craig Kilborn).
So yeah, lots of ways this thing could’ve just been an absolute failure, and there’s no MCU to speak of and none of the gajillion dollar MCU ever happens. (And yes, I’m very open to the opinion – and have felt this way myself quite a bit – that a world without MCU movies would be a very good thing.)
But I think, watching this movie for just the second time, 14 years since I originally saw it, that this thing is enormously successful, and I think a lot of that is on Downey. Reading about the movie this morning, I’m seeing that apparently a lot of the dialogue wasn’t finished, and so RDJ and the rest of the cast kind of improvised or ad-libbed a lot of it as things went along. And so what strikes me now is how much Tony Stark – in this first movie anyway – is just Downey transposing his Paul Avery character from Zodiac into this movie.
Which totally works, by the way. In Zodiac, Downey’s verson of Avery is a wise-cracking, smart newspaper reporter who we see fading into obscurity thanks to living life to excess – which holy career parallels, Batman. And that fits the Stark character really well, I think.
But what also helps a lot here, I think, is that Downey also does buy into this role. I think he’s having a lot of fun with it, for sure, but he also seems to be fully invested in the character and setting and movie. You could forgive the guy for having done some recent research on Marvel movies, especially the Fantastic Four films, and deciding to play this all very broadly with high camp and knowing winks at the audience. But it serves this all very well that he’s not interested (at least not often) in going there. I don’t know Tony Stark from the comics at all, but playing him as a louche, wiseacre playboy seems like the perfect choice here whether that’s how the character was drawn originally or not.
Finally, there’s the special effects. Some of these have aged really well, and some not quite so much. Iron Man zooming like a meteor across the darkened sky of Southern California looks fantastic. Those shots are amazing! But some other scenes (like Stark in his Iron Man prototype flaming up the camp early on) still look pretty green-screeny.
Overall, though, man…this is a really good start. I thought Jeff Bridges was an interesting, but ultimately successful choice for the uber-villain here. His Big Lebowski-ish personality has kind of subsumed him today, but he’s really good as the backslapping, unctuous Stane. And even Gwyneth Paltrow worked well here, a reminder that she could deliver and wasn’t always this kind of weird Goop pitcher.
On to The Hulk.
Citation needed. I don’t believe this is true.
At the time, I liked Iron Man a lot, but I had chalked that up to my expectations being super low because of all the godawful superhero movies that came before. I watched it with fresh eyes a couple of years ago and was pleased to find that yeah, it was actually pretty good!
Both Ang Lee’s 2003 Hulk and the 2008 Incredible Hulk are origin stories, so I don’t see how it can be true that one is a sequel to the other.
Glad you liked Iron Man. Please don’t give up after Incredible Hulk :)
The MCU Empire certainly owes a lot, a whole whole lot, to the homerun casting and solid performance of RDJ in Iron Man. Plus, they seeded the whole mega-franchise with an origin movie about a superhero no one had even heard of outside of a comic book store. No matter what you think of the various movies themselves, the MCU is a helluva business and marketing accomplishment, and perhaps a lesson in patience and perseverance as they pushed through some of the less successful films to get to the promised land of Infinity War/Endgame. Other studios may have bailed early after the Hulk or Iron Man 2, but the MCU kept going head down toward the finish line, or at least the first phase of the finish line.
Compare that to what Warner has done with the most recognizable superhero properties on the planet: Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman. There are two films that I had been waiting four decades to see – Batman vs. Superman and Justice League – and they botched them both. One could argue that the meandering path taken by DC has (eventually, whew) led to stuff like Joker and The Batman (and heck, I’ll even add Superman and Lois and the new animated Harley Quinn), which some may find more interesting than Microsoft Project presents: The Avengers Franchise: Gantt Chart Edition! But it is hard to ignore the Mount Everests of cash that Warner has apparently left on the table with little capes and bats and lasso watermarks all over it.
It’s more complicated than that: The movie rights to the Hulk belong to Universal, so they get most of the profits from any Hulk solo movies, which is why we haven’t seen any past The Incredible Hulk. And if you don’t have the Hulk solo movies, it’s less likely that they’ll bring in the solo love interest or villain: Jane Foster doesn’t show up in Avengers, Peggy Carter doesn’t appear in Age of Ultron, and so on.
As for the heart rate thing, it’s not really that different in the later movies; it’s just not “my watch got to 100 so now I’m the Hulk.”
Really, it’s just the replacement of the lead actor that makes it easy to discount the film as a whole, when it probably has as many discarded plot lines as any other solo movie.
No…it’s a Marvel Studios film where the events are in continuity and referenced and shown in the other movies and the characters cross over, so it’s canon.
Hulk '08 isn’t an origin story, he’s been managing his hulkness for quite some time at the opening of that film - it’s the whole reason he’s hiding in Brazil. On the question of it being a sequel I couldn’t say, since I’ve never seen the '03 movie.
It occurs to me much too late we should’ve all trolled trigger and insisted he watch ABC’s Inhumans miniseries—the show so bad no one even remembered to bring it up in a warning.
The Ang Lee Hulk film had Bruce Banner’s convoluted origin (spoilers: he is genetically altered, AND exposed to a gamma explosion, AND exposed to gamma radiation in the lab), and it ends with him hiding out in South America. And the Incredible Hulk has a quick origin over the opening credits, and starts with him hiding out in South America.
But they streamlined his origin in The Incredible Hulk, and it doesn’t match the events of Hulk, which are never referenced again.