The Great Marvel Rewatch: Iron Man 3

Following the Battle of New York and his resulting near-death experience, Tony Stark is suffering from PTSD. He buries himself in his work to try to recover, but this merely cuts him off from his friends and those who can help. When a new enemy emerges, a terrorist mastermind known as the Mandarin, Stark reluctantly returns to duty.

Iron Man 3 is arguably the most divisive film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, some hailing it as the very best film in the franchise and others as one of the worst. It's certainly one of the more interesting films, taking as its starting point the idea that the idea of saving the world, fighting alien monsters and being aware that the universe is a much bigger and weirder place than most realise, is quite stressful. For Tony Stark, whose arrogance, womanising and boasting has already been established as hiding a less confident and more self-doubting character, it's clear that such revelations might push him and his established issues (including borderline obsessive-compulsive behaviour) to the breaking point.

Of course, whilst these elements add depth and character development, it's also the case that we've already followed Stark's journey of self-reflection through three previous movies and piling yet more stuff on him might make the film feel self-indulgent, and it has to be said it does, at times. A lengthy side-sojourn as Stark meets up with a young kid who helps him reconnect and overcome his newfound anxiety issues feels decidedly random (cute kids being a trope most modern superhero movies avoid, and its intrusion here makes us appreciate why), and the film puts most of the regular cast (and even the iconic armour) on ice for half the film as Stark goes on a road trip through Tennessee and Florida.

As usual, it's Robert Downey Jr.'s charismatic performance that keeps the interest going whenever the pacing dips. There is a much stronger-than-normal cast on the antagonist/guest star side of things, with great performances by Rebecca Hall, Guy Pearce and Sir Ben Kingsley, although they all suffer from the early MCU villain problem of not being given enough time for real character development. Peace in particular, a canny and subtle performer, is reduced to lunatic villainous ranting, which is disappointing. Hall has very little to do, apparently the result of a last-minute rewrite that saw her role reduced from the main antagonist because focus groups revealed her toy wouldn't sell!

The film also suffers a little from the traditional post-Avengers issue of there being a big threat going on, but for some reason only one of the team is involved. The film certainly doesn't address why Captain America and SHIELD completely sit out the crisis, when it feels very much in their area of interest.

Still, the film does remember it's as superhero action movie in time for some impressive set pieces at the end, including an impressive airplane rescue and a concluding dockyard battle. As spectacle, Iron Man 3 is reasonably successful and its decision to deep dive into Tony Stark's psyche is a laudable attempt at characterisation but one that feels a bit redundant at this stage. As such, Iron Man 3 (***½) is watchable, entertaining, but can't quite deliver on its ambitions to deliver a deeper-than-normal superhero experience, and has to settle for just being fun, if a little forgettable.

The Great Marvel Rewatch: The Avengers

A powerful device called the Tesseract has been studied by the American intelligence organisation SHIELD for the past few decades, who believe it can be used to unlock the secret of creating infinitely renewable energy sources. Loki, a powerful entity from the world of Asgard, steals the cube and plans to use it to open a dimensional portal to allow an alien race to invade the planet. SHIELD calls in its top agents (including Clint "Hawkeye" Barton and Natasha '"Black Widow" Romanoff) and most powerful allies to answer the threat. Leading the fight are the recently-revived Steve Rogers (Captain America), the billionaire industrialist Tony Stark (Iron Man) and the mild-mannered Bruce Banner (the Hulk). The Asgardians, aware of the extent of Loki's threat, also dispatch Thor to aid in his containment. The result is mayhem as the two sides clash in the streets of New York City, with the fate of the Earth (and potentially many other worlds) at stake.

The Avengers was the culmination of Marvel's first five-year cinematic masterplan. Scenes establishing SHIELD and the Avengers Initiative were seeded into its earlier movies - The Incredible Hulk, Captain America and Thor, as well as the two Iron Man movies - in preparation for this film, where all the different superheroes get together to fight a massive threat. Aware it would take one heck of a director to keep all the actors, egos and storylines from spiralling out of control, Marvel called in Joss Whedon. Whedon may not have been the most bankable choice - his previous movie, Serenity, barely broke even and he had several failed TV projects in succession by that point - but he was by far the most logical one. With critically-acclaimed runs on several Marvel comics and dialogue work on the original X-Men movie under his belt, not to mention form with handling large, disparate casts from his TV projects Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Firefly and Dollhouse, Whedon proved a good choice.

With only two hours to play with and a dozen notable characters to do justice to, Whedon gets to the point straight away. The action-packed opening few minutes establish the premise (Tom Hiddleston returning as Loki and making even more of an impact than in Thor, though he does get a little lost in the mix later on) and we immediately get to the "getting the team together" sequence. Mark Ruffalo has the hardest task here, as he has to step into the well-worn shoes of the Hulk (replacing Edward Norton who in turn had replaced Eric Bana) and sell a difficult character to the audience. He immediately succeeds, bringing a combination of cynicism, brilliance and humanity to the role of Banner, which is the stand-out performance of the film. The rest of the team is assembled pretty quickly, apart from Thor who is unreachable (thanks to the events of his own film). Needless to say, he gets over that complication fairly quickly (and possibly way too easily) to join in with the mayhem. Unfortunately, he seems to have lost a little of the fun and wit that he displayed in his own movie, but given his personal stake in the action (Loki being his brother, well, adopted) that's unsurprising. Whedon employs his ability to get lots of different characters into a room and spark off one another to the full, with Robert Downey Jnr's Tony Stark running off with many of the best lines. Chris Evans's Captain America is a little passive in the early stages, but his clear-headedness and ability to take command of the situation eventually wins through and earns him the respect of the rest of the team.

More impressive is that Whedon doesn't neglect the large battery of secondary characters. In particular, he promotes Scarlett Johansson's Black Widow and Jeremy Renner's Hawkeye to equal billing as the "big four", giving them plenty to do. Johansson walks off with the best scene in the movie (a great confrontation between her and Loki which twists and turns through various tones and different head-games) and is much better-served than many of the female roles in the other Marvel movies (Gwyneth Paltrow has sod all to do, but does get some good lines in her brief appearance as Pepper). Samuel L. Jackson gets more to do as Nick Fury rather than just handing out mission briefings, whilst Clark Gregg's Agent Coulson also gets an amusing subplot where he turns out to be a Captain America fanboy.

However, what makes The Avengers really work is that it's a comic book movie which remembers that it's a comic book movie, featuring guys in ridiculous costumers unleashing ludicrous amounts of violence against CGI monsters, and having fun with that idea. There are genuine comic book moments of awesome throughout the picture, most notably the revelation of the SHIELD Helicarrier. It may be ridiculously impractical as a mode of transport (as rapidly proven in the film) but it's an impressive design. Most of the action sequences are excellent, and Whedon does his best to keep the CGI under control and investing us in the characters and their actions. This falters during the concluding action sequence in New York City, which occasionally teeters on the edge of a Michael Bay-shaped abyss of confusing explosions, but Whedon just about manages to stop it slipping into total anarchy. The characters get moments to show off their heroism and Whedon's typical humour grounds things nicely (a moment between Thor and Loki during the final battle getting the movie's biggest laugh).

The biggest casualty of the film is that the bad guys suffer a little. Their motives for invading Earth are never really explained and it's unclear how exactly Loki was able to win them over (though the post-credits sequence does give a clue). Using the Cosmic Cube/Tesseract as the movie's maguffin is a good idea (since it's been well-established in several previous pictures) although we still don't get any explanation of its origin or purpose...yet.

On almost every other level, Whedon pulled it off. The film has massive action set pieces but also moments of humour, characterisation and humanity. It does a good job handling the major heroes but it doesn't neglect the side-players. The effects are impressive but don't overwhelm the picture (though coming close on occasion). Most notably, he managed to combine these crazy characters and their different realities and tones into one story successfully.

The Avengers (****½) is, simply put, a ridiculously entertaining and fun movie.

Note: the original version of this review was posted in 2012.

The Great Marvel Rewatch: Iron Man 2

Tony Stark has revealed to the world that he is Iron Man, which has led to a huge amount of publicity and fame, but it has also led to criticism by corporate rivals and repeated attempts by the US government to seize his technology for their own use. As Stark fends off legal troubles, he also faces a new threat from a former ally of his father's.

Iron Man 2 is the very definition of a standard Hollywood sequel. It's bigger, brasher and noisier than its forebear, operates on a larger scale and clearly has more money running through it. There's more explosions, more Iron Man suits, more shout-outs to the wider Marvel universe and, well, more stuff going on.

What it isn't, necessarily, is more fun. The original Iron Man was entertaining and breezy, although lacking in real story or character depth. Iron Man 2 feels perfunctory and also perhaps a bit too overstuffed at times. There's a lot of shout-outs to Thor (which takes place simultaneously with this movie), SHIELD and Nick Fury have a larger presence and the movie spends some time setting up the character of Black Widow. The net result of this is that erstwhile villains Ivan Vanko (a effective but clearly unchallenged Mickey Rourke) and Justin Hammer (an entertaining but entirely nonthreatening Sam Rockwell) spend most of the movie off-screen. The Marvel "villain problem" is clearly a major issue in this film, with most of the time spent fighting unmanned drones rather than the actual bad guys, who are rather quickly disposed of and don't have much to do.

What the film does do, surprisingly, is dedicate a significant amount of time to Tony Stark's mental state and his character development as he strives to be a better person and face his own mortality, eventually overcoming it, recognising his weaknesses and becoming a more effective leader, setting up his role in The Avengers. This is something the film does quite well - maybe to the point of spending too much time on it - and better than I think the film is often credited for. Iron Man 2 is arguably the closest we get in the MCU to seeing what these characters are doing in their down time when the world isn't under threat of imminent annihilation.

The result is that Iron Man 2 (***½)  a bit of an oddball movie. The villains are decidedly non-threatening and the film is more concerned with the characters' internal lives and relationships than with heroics. But that's also something of a strength, especially given the strength of the cast. The result is a movie that's less straight-up fun than its forebear, but balances that out with stronger characterisation and better worldbuilding.

The Great Marvel Rewatch: Iron Man

Ahead of the release of Avengers: Endgame in a month's time, which will conclude both Phase Three of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and also conclude the storylines that have been building since the MCU launched in 2008, I will be rewatching all of the Marvel movies released to date, in some cases revisiting older reviews and in others issuing new reviews. Let's do this.

Stark Industries is one of the US military's most advanced and reliable weapons contractors, at least until its chief executive and resident inventor-genius Tony Stark is kidnapped by Afghan terrorists. Escaping with the help of a local translator - and a home-made cybernetic suit of immense destructive power - Stark sets about revamping his company's ethos, something that does not meet with the approval of his fellows.

Back in 2008, Iron Man was a simple knockabout popcorn flick which seemingly had no great ambition beyond being a fun superhero movie. Contrasted against the other big superhero flick of the year, the intense-but-overwrought-and-overlong The Dark Knight, it came off as breezy and fun, although it also risked being seen as lightweight and disposable. My initial reception to the film was that it was a mediocre flick that was single-handedly saved by some fine performances, most obviously Robert Downey Jr. but also Gwyneth Paltrow, Shaun Toub, Jeff Bridges and Terrence Howard providing able foils (Faran Tahir is distinctly under-used as seeming antagonist Raza though).

My other complaint was that the film was kind of stupid, with Stark building his first Iron Man suit out of leftover missile components in a cave in the Afghan mountains, which was less "unlikely" as "completely implausible." It may be my appreciation for cheesy comic book antics has increased in the meantime, but on this rewatch I found the development to be more forgivable, although the fact that the Afghan terrorists somehow don't cotton on that something is wrong despite having 24 hour video surveillance of what Stark is doing remains ridiculous.

Viewed on its own merits, Iron Man is much as it was in 2008: a fun, less serious and more lightweight superhero movie which is saved from being forgettable by some good laughs and Robert Downey Jr.'s relaxed performance as Stark, which is arrogant enough to make you initially dislike him but then charming and centred enough to make you care about his redemption arc. On this basis, the film works fine.

Of course, it is now impossible to rewatch Iron Man without being aware of the twenty (and counting) films that follow in its wake. It definitely disappears into the lower-middle end of the full pack of MCU movies, but it's fun to see the worldbuilding and scene-setting going on for later movies: Clark Gregg's presence as Agent Coulson (struggling to find a good name for SHIELD); Obadiah Stane's massive armour clearly being an inspiration for the later "Hulkbuster" suit; and of course the first post-credits sequence, which introduces Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury and foreshadows the formation of the Avengers. From such small seeds a huge legacy was generated.

Iron Man (***½) is a lot of fun, and is a more enjoyable in hindsight than I was expecting, but it's clear that Marvel weren't quite the finely-oiled machine they are now.

Note: the original version of this review was published in 2008 and yikes, I was pretty harsh on it. I must be getting soft in my old age.

The Avengers: Infinity War

The Titan Thanos has begun his plan to unite the Infinity Stones and wipe out half of the life the universe. His plan involves seizing the Stones from remote planets, the Collector of Knowhere and from Xandar, and the several Stones that have come to rest on Earth. In deep space the Guardians of the Galaxy join forces with Thor to defeat Thanos, whilst on Earth the fractured Avengers have to overcome their differences and unite again to fight his armies.

It's entirely possible that no movie in history has had a build-up like Infinity War. Almost every one of the eighteen preceding movies in the Marvel Cinematic Universe has been laying pipe and groundwork for this film, from introducing the Infinity Stones one-by-one to brief appearances by Thanos to the introduction of both the extravagant space opera and mystical sides of the universe through Guardians of the Galaxy and Doctor Strange. Marvel and Disney have shown tremendous restraint and forbearance in not pulling the triggers on those stories too early and making sure they have their ducks lined up in just the right row before finally committing.

Infinity War is an insanely massive movie. Starting as it means to go on - with a massacre which leaves several established characters dead and one MIA (which weirdly goes unmentioned for the whole movie) - the film barely lets up. Characters big and small going right back to the start of the MCU ten years ago (including some you thought you'd never see again) show up, some with large roles to play, some for an extended cameo. Despite the weight of the massive cast, directors Anthony and Joe Russo and writers Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely somehow create a very coherent film with four distinct acts and the kind of tension filled, multi-pronged final battle on two separate fronts that we haven't seen since Return of the Jedi.

It also helps that although the movie is filled to the brim with heroes and big personalities, the film keeps its focus firmly on a central quintet. Thanos himself dominates proceedings, Josh Brolin (somehow) investing this big purple dude with some real pathos in scenes where we learn more about his backstory, his family and his homeworld. Gamora (Zoe Saldana) also has a major role to play, her family issues with both Thanos and Nebula proving a key emotional motivation for the film. Thor (Chris Hemsworth) also has a lot of screentime, clearly having feeling annoyed after the events of Thor: Ragnarok and determined to kick someone's backside. Scenes pairing him and Bradley Cooper's Rocket Raccoon (or "Rabbit" as Thor insists) are excellent, and then get better when they join forces with a giant space dwarf played by Peter Dinklage. Dinklage's screentime is limited but extraordinarily effective (he also gets arguably the best line of the movie, but it's a really tough choice). Rounding off the central focus is Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) and Dr. Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch), two extremely different people who prove to be an effective team.

Lots of other characters get their moments in the sun (although Mark Ruffalo's Bruce Banner seems to be reduced to a harbinger of doom whilst he's dealing with, er, "performance" problems as Hulk), although the role of Captain America (Chris Evans) in the movie is surprisingly small. The directors know how to deliver a great superhero arrival scene just as all hope seems lost and also how to frame an action sequence. There's a lot of explosions, CG people being flung around and strange creatures and it all flows mostly well, with only a couple of moments where CG fatigue threatens to set in. Infinity War is not a movie any sane person can call restrained, but it's a movie that knows when and where to deploy its monstrous resources (adjusted for inflation, Infinity War is the most expensive movie ever made) to maximum effect.

It's also a surprisingly emotional movie. The weakness of films - and the reason we've seen television explode in comparison recently - is that it's very hard to introduce characters, establish motivation, emotionally invest the audience and then deliver a payoff in under two hours. Infinity War is instead able to draw on almost forty hours of previous character development in the MCU, so even when a fairly minor character bites the dust it hurts a little. When more major characters bite it, things get real (and at least some of these characters aren't coming back).

When the movie runs aground is in its ending, which is impossible to talk about without major spoilers. Suffice to say that the Chekhov's Gun maxim is employed by full force in the film and when you walk out of the cinema - especially if you know the significance of the post-credit sequence and what movie will immediately precede Infinity War II next year - you'll probably be able to immediately pen a fairly close outline of what happens. I mean, if they completely wrong-foot us, fair enough, but some of the choices made in the ending are completely nonsensical if you have any knowledge of what's coming and what's not coming down the Marvel production pipe later on.

Another major weakness is that the film undersells its new team of villains, the Black Order (servants of Thanos). Tom Vaughan-Lawlor as Ebony Maw and Carrie Coon as Proxima Midnight are particularly excellent, but both get limited screen time (especially Carrie Coon, one of the best actresses on TV, who is almost unrecognisable).

Finally, Marvel has gone to some lengths to say that Infinity War is a stand-alone movie and it's as-yet untitled sequel next year (which has already been shot) is a movie in its own right and not just the second half of one bigger story. That's quite frankly untrue, and a lot of the more dramatic and emotional moments from Infinity War will live or die depending on what happens in the sequel.

If you can step out of the meta-knowledge, The Avengers: Infinity War (****) is a very effective action movie with lots of solid action scenes, some real dramatic moments of power and a refreshingly ruthless attitude to its cast of massive stars. It lacks the pacing, focus and character interplay of, say, Guardians of the Galaxy or Black Panther (or even the first Avengers), but's in the upper tier of Marvel Cinematic Universe films and in balancing an unprecedentedly vast cast with solid storytelling, it's almost achieves the impossible.

The film is on general release worldwide from today.

The Avengers

A powerful device called the Tesseract has been studied by the American intelligence organisation SHIELD for the past few decades, who believe it can be used to unlock the secret of creating infinitely renewable energy sources. Loki, a powerful entity from the world of Asgard, steals the cube and plans to use it to open a dimensional portal to allow an alien race to invade the planet. SHIELD calls in its top agents (including Clint 'Hawkeye' Barton and Natasha 'Black Widow' Romanoff) and most powerful allies to answer the threat. Leading the fight are the recently-revived Steve Rogers (Captain America), the billionaire industrialist Tony Stark (Iron Man) and the mild-mannered Bruce Banner (the Hulk). The Asgardians, aware of the extent of Loki's threat, also dispatch Thor to aid in his containment. The result is mayhem as the two sides clash in the streets of New York City, with the fate of the Earth (and potentially many other worlds) at stake.

The Avengers is the culmination of Marvel's five-year cinematic masterplan. Scenes establishing SHIELD and the Avengers Initiative were seeded into its earlier movies - The Incredible Hulk, Captain America and Thor, as well as the two Iron Man movies - in preparation for this film, where all the different superheroes get together to fight a massive threat. Aware it would take one heck of a director to keep all the actors, egos and storylines from spiralling out of control, Marvel called in Joss Whedon. Whedon may not have been the most bankable choice - his previous movie, Serenity, barely broke even and he's had several failed TV projects in succession - but he was by far the most logical one. With critically-acclaimed runs on several Marvel comics and dialogue work on the original X-Men movie under his belt, not to mention form with handling large, disparate casts, Whedon proved a good choice.

With only two hours to play with and a dozen notable characters to do justice to, Whedon gets to the point straight away. The action-packed opening few minutes establish the premise (Tom Hiddleston returning as Loki and making even more of an impact than in Thor, though he does get a little lost in the mix later on) and we immediately get to the 'getting the team together' sequence. Mark Ruffalo has the hardest task here, as he has to step into the well-worn shoes of the Hulk (replacing Edward Norton who in turn had replaced Eric Bana) and sell a difficult character to the audience. He immediately succeeds, bringing a combination of cynicism, brilliance and humanity to the role of Banner, which is the stand-out performance of the film. The rest of the team is assembled pretty quickly, apart from Thor who is unreachable (thanks to the events of his own film). Needless to say, he gets over that complication fairly quickly (and possibly way too easily) to join in with the mayhem. Unfortunately, he seems to have lost a little of the fun and wit that he displayed in his own movie, but given his personal stake in the action (Loki being his brother) that's unsurprising. Whedon employs his ability to get lots of different characters into a room and spark off one another to the full, with Robert Downey Jnr's Tony Stark running off with many of the best lines. Chris Evans's Captain America is a little passive in the early stages, but his clear-headedness and ability to take command of the situation eventually wins through and earns him the respect of the rest of the team.

More impressive is that Whedon doesn't neglect the large battery of secondary characters. In particular, he promotes Scarlett Johansson's Black Widow and Jeremy Renner's Hawkeye to equal billing as the 'big four', giving them plenty to do. Johansson walks off with the best scene in the movie (a great confrontation between her and Loki which twists and turns through various tones and different head-games) and is much better-served than many of the female roles in the other Marvel movies (Gwyneth Paltrow also gets some excellent lines in her brief appearance as Pepper). Samuel L. Jackson gets more to do as Nick Fury rather than just handing out mission briefings, whilst Clark Gregg's Agent Coulson also gets an amusing subplot where he turns out to be a Captain America fanboy.

However, what makes The Avengers really work is that it's a comic book movie which remembers that it's a comic book movie, featuring guys in ridiculous costumers unleashing ludicrous amounts of violence against CGI monsters, and having fun with that idea. There are genuine comic book moments of awesome throughout the picture, most notably the revelation of the SHIELD Helicarrier. It may be ridiculously impractical as a mode of transport (as rapidly proven in the film) but it's an impressive design. Most of the action sequences are impressive, and Whedon does his best to keep the CGI under control and investing us in the characters and their actions. This falters during the concluding action sequence in New York City, which occasionally teeters on the edge of a Michael Bay-shaped abyss of confusing explosions, but Whedon just about manages to stop it slipping into total anarchy. The characters get moments to show off their heroism and Whedon's typical humour grounds things nicely (a moment between Thor and Hulk during the final battle getting the movie's biggest laugh).

The biggest casualty of the film is that the bad guys suffer a little. Their motives for invading Earth are never really explained and it's unclear how exactly Loki was able to win them over (though the post-credits sequence does give a clue). Using the Cosmic Cube/Tesseract as the movie's maguffin is a good idea (since it's been well-established in several previous pictures) although we still don't get any explanation of its origin or purpose.

On almost every other level, Whedon has pulled it off. The film has massive action set pieces but also moments of humour, characterisation and humanity. It does a good job handling the major heroes but it doesn't neglect the side-players. The effects are impressive but don't overwhelm the picture (though coming close on occasion). Most notably, he manages to combine these crazy characters and their different realities and tones into one story successfully.

The Avengers (****½) is a ridiculously entertaining and fun movie. It's in the cinemas right now.