Iron Man 3 RETRO-REVIEW

Image Courtesy
www.southerngirlramblings.com

To be honest, I’m torn when it comes to Iron Man 3.  On the one hand it offers an excellent character study of Tony Stark, follows up on plots and themes from both The Avengers and the previous Iron Man movies, and introduces concepts and tech which appear in Iron Man’s next two appearances.  On the other hand, it’s the third Iron Man movie with a corrupt businessman as the villain.  There are a lot of good things that we can say about this movie, but it is not without its flaws—but, then, what movie is without flaws?

Captain America: Civil War TL;DW

Image Courtesy www.comicbook.com

Marvel’s Captain America: Civil War opens in U.S. theaters just over a week from today on Friday, May 6.  This will be the 13^th movie released as part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), which also includes a number of tie-in comics as well as four TV series (and counting).  It’s almost certain that just about everyone in the world will go to see this movie, but they will not all have seen everything that came before it in the MCU.  And there is the chance that at least some of these will be completely new to the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU).  So to help these people out, here is a “Too Long; Didn’t Watch” summary of the MCU to date, focusing especially on what is relevant to Captain America: Civil War.  At the end I will offer my three suggestions for movies that you should watch (or rewatch) before going to see Captain America: Civil War, and why those three.  We’ll start from the beginning, with Iron Man.

Note:  There will (obviously) be spoilers.  Also, these TL;DW articles are starting to get loooong!

The Civil War Conflict Has Been Built into the MCU All Along

Image Courtesy www.comicbook.com

Here we are, 4 weeks away from the wide release of Captain America: Civil War.  This movie has been hotly anticipated ever since Disney announced last year that the third Captain America movie would not have the subtitle “Serpent Society,” but instead would be titled Captain America: Civil War.  However, to think that the MCU Civil War has only been building for a couple of years would be to ignore the facts.  It’s not like Tony Stark and Steve Rogers just decided one day that they wanted to disagree about something, picked the Sokovia Accords, and duked it out.  No, this conflict over accountability vs. freedom has actually been built into the very DNA of the Marvel Cinematic Universe virtually since its inception.  You might say that these heroes were always destined to come into conflict, either with each other or with the government; the time and place was the only question left to be answered.

Frankly, this Civil War has been a long time coming.

Looking Back at MCU Phase 2

Image Courtesy www.screenrant.com

Now that Ant-Man is over and Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. is going to start its third season at the end of next month (thus kicking off Phase 3 of the Marvel Cinematic Universe), this seems like as good a time as any to look back at MCU Phase 2 and see just what happened.  Next week I will have another article looking ahead to Phase 3, but before we get there, let’s take a look at Phase 2 and see what themes it explored.