Loki was never supposed to be menacing. He is, by definition, a trickster. The biggest enemy the Avengers and S.H.I.E.L.D. has faced to date has been themselves, and that is a deliberate choice. (Both the Chitauri and the Sakaarans have been classic stormtrooper fodder; a paper menace that couldn’t even threaten the least members of the Avengers or Guardians respectively.) Thanos is the obvious big bad, although to date he’s been pretty much just sitting around doing fuck all so far.
Stranger
I’ll agree that Guardians was the most fun of them, and a great movie overall (I’d put it just behind The Avengers). I can think of very few movies, period, that are that fun, and most of them are in the so-bad-it’s-good category. Guardians is both fun and good.
Not only that, but the characterization of Loki - as well as Loki and Thor’s relationship - drives most of the interesting development. Loki’s a trickster, sure, but he also really wants to be the hero in the story and that leads him to do things to undermine the other heroes.
He’s also the only one willing to speak cynically about the heroes and whether what they do is worth doing.
“This is so unlike you, brother. So clandestine. Are you sure you wouldn’t rather just punch your way out?”
“If you keep speaking I just might.”
“Fine. As you wish. I’m not even here.”
Later turns into Captain America.
“Oh, this is MUCH better. Whoa. Costume’s a bit much. A bit tight. But the confidence! I can FEEL the righteousness surging. Hey! Wanna have a rousing discussion about TRUTH? Honor? Patriotism? GOD BLESS AM…”
Thor pins him to the wall.
Also, this exchange later…
Loki: “Satisfaction is not in my nature.”
Thor: “Surrender’s not in mine.”
Those two bits - both from Thor 2, by the way - allow Hiddleston to define Loki not just as the greatest villain in the MCU but potentially the greatest and best defined character of any type.
Seriously, Hiddleston has stolen that entire series of movies out from under the rest of the entire cast. There’s a reason he keeps coming back. By the time he’s done he’ll have been in…
3 Thor Movies
1 Avenger movie (and possibly both Infinity War movies AND he had scenes in Avengers 2 that didn’t make the final cut)
Don’t get me wrong, I also enjoyed it, I’ve liked all of them despite myself, but in the overall scheme of things there’s not much significance to the plot that will affect things going on, except arguably Loki’s shenanigans. Also a couple of the actors clearly didn’t want to be there.
Raiders of the Lost Ark, the original Star Wars, The Incredibles, and Shichinin No Samurai come to mind as movies that are both consistently fun and good (despite certain plot deficiencies in the first two). I was hoping for a good movie from James Gunn, but he far exceeded my expectations, and I am anticipating Vol. 2 as much as any film coming in the next year.
Agreed, and I expect to see him in Infinity Wars, perhaps even redeeming himself against the threat of Thanos (to his own advantage, of course). I hope he keeps playing the role indefinitely; I liked his performance as Prince Hal in the BBC series The Hollow Crown (adaptations of Shakespeare’s Richard II, Henry IV (both parts), and Henry V) but he has been phenomenal as Loki, and I cannot imagine another actor in the role.
Stranger
So, I finally got caught up through Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Season Two. There’s a jump between episodes 19 and 20 where they assume you went out and watched Age of Ultron. It was an abrupt disruption to the storyline about an internal struggle for the future of S.H.I.E.L.D. Suddenly, in between two episodes they all went “Well, I guess we’d better put our differences aside after all that shit.”
I really enjoyed Guardians when I first saw it in the theater and have since watched it a few times more on DVD. And you know what? It’s become not only my favorite Marvel film (which is amazing since I had no connection/knowledge of any of the main characters, I began reading Marvel comics in the late 60’s and stopped around 2002, 2003) but it’s also become my favorite Sci Fi/Adventure film of all time. Yes, I think it blows Star Wars away (and I saw Star Wars in the theater in 1977 when I was 16) The writing, dialogue, characters, everything just hit me the right way!
If it had been a week or two before the release of Civil War and your question had been “What selection of Marvel films should I put together for a marathon before seeing the new release?”… well, then I might have pared down the list for you a bit. You want to plan a marathon to stretch out over the summer? Why not just plan on doing all of them?
Really, you’d be looking at fitting in 12 films over 8 weeks, which is easy to do. Most fans of the series agree that they even find their least favorite of these films to still be enjoyable. And of course you personally may enjoy certain films more than the general consensus would suggest- I personally really like Iron Man 2 and Thor: The Dark World has what was for me the biggest single laugh* out of all the films.
Edit to Add: …and I would just watch them in order of release rather than chronological. Order of release gives you information in the order you’re meant to receive it for storytelling purposes.
Yeah, thelurkinghorror is correct on this. Only the 2008 film with Edward Norton is included in the MCU.
*The biggest laugh for me out of the entire MCU is Natalie Portman’s delivery of the line “Really?”
[ul]
[li]Thor and Jane find their way through a portal back to Earth because Jane’s phone gets reception on the opposite side of the portal and she receives a call from Richard, a guy she had gone out with on a date.[/li][li]Returning to Earth they are facing an immenent threat to all of existence.[/li][li]Thor, attempting to sound casual about the inquiry asks, “So, who’s Richard?”[/li][li]Jane: “Really!?”[/li][/ul]
Cracks me up every time. Funniest joke in the entire series of films as far as I’m concerned.
And I’ll echo what Jonathan Chance said about this film being a wonderful showcase for Hiddleston and I’ll add that I enjoy every bit of screen time that Kat Dennings gets as Darcy. “Well look at you, still all muscle-y.” “How’s space?”
Redford’s Pierce in Winter Soldier was a solid baddie for that film. The Iron Mqn villains in 1 & 3 were fine. Not that I’d need to see any of them in another film, but they did the trick.
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I disagree.
[spoiler]I figure the ending to DARK WORLD, where Thor leaves the throne to Odin, and Odin turns out to be Loki, fits with what we saw in THOR and AVENGERS: Loki wants to be a king, and will scheme as best he can to get it – and will lose in a straight fight with anyone in Thor’s class, and so prefers to rely on illusions while an army does the dirty work. He’s still a physical threat to various supers, but if he’s doing his job right, he doesn’t need to be; he has people for that.
As one of two princes, he tried to get there by ‘saving the day’ when an army showed up – on his say-so – after he got his rival banished and depowered. As someone who could ally himself with the army of a would-be conqueror, he gave it a go on Earth as he had in Asgard. And, when back in Asgard, he tried a third tactic by impersonating someone who was already the monarch – and it worked better than his first plan, which worked better than his second plan.
AVENGERS might have been a low point because his plan flopped, but his plan in THOR worked for a while, and his plan in DARK WORLD apparently worked great.[/spoiler]
I’d go so far as to say that most Marvel villains are a cut above most movie baddies. They just tend not to stand as much comparatively with the colorful, crazy heroes are running about on-screen. A couple got short-changed, such as Malekith from Thor: The Dark World, where they recut the movie to emphasize Loki instead of him.
The biggest problem is that Marvel movies have the bad habit of killing off the villains. Some of them should get killed, but others should just get run off to lick their wounds. It would also help if more of them had plans beyond “Destroy the World!” The film industry just doesn’t quite comprehend that the world is a rather distant concept, and people are much more interested in something personal.
The villain in Captain America: Civil War is a interesting conceptually (spoiler ahead; you’ve been warned.)
He’s a fairly unimpressive guy. It turns out he’s about as badass as a normal human can get but that’s not much against the Avengers. Instead, he turns them against each other, and it hardly even takes a spark before they’re tear each other to pieces. They’re worried he had some dastardly villain plan, but it turns out that was the plan. Here, the fact that he looks like mild-mannered, ordinary guy actually works in his favor in the end.
None of the rest hold a candle to Loki, of course, but I’d say that Malekith was the only actually bad villain in the lot. Nihilism is not an interesting motivation for a villain. But profiteering? Fascism? Personal revenge? Those are all interesting enough. The villain in Guardians was maybe a bit cookie-cutter, but really, he needed to be, to leave room to introduce and develop the five brand-new heroes plus supporting characters. And even there, misguided honor isn’t a bad motivation, either.
The comics Ronan is a bit more nuanced than GotG. Antiheroic, even.
Cracked recently had an article suggesting that The Dark Knight has ruined comic book movies. One point the author made was that the Joker’s compelling insanity (he was portrayed, as I would characterize it, as an aesthete who found beauty in chaos and had contempt for rational motivation) was read as there being no need to give the villain any real motive, and so we started getting a bunch of villains whose only purpose in life was to be villainous.
Loki, on the other hand, feels the sting of rejection from his adopted family. Jealousy over his beloved heroic, if somewhat dim, brother. He desires power, but largely as a means to lash out against those who have hurt him. I mean, he’s an asshole, but he’s an asshole with an actual agenda.
“Are you ever not going to fall for that?”
Except that a major chunk of comic book movies consists of the MCU, which has not fallen into that trap.
Malekith wasn’t a nihilist. Plunging the Universe into Darkness would have effectively “destroyed” the Universe for every other race in existence but he wasn’t truly aiming to destroy the Universe, he was trying to restore an earlier state of the Universe within which his race thrived- in fact, the only state of the Universe under which his race could possibly thrive.
I never got all the Malekith hate. The general rule for what makes a good villain is that the villain is the hero from his own point of view. Malekith totally meets this standard.
Just want to say, if you’re watching the movies as a buildup to the Infinity Wars movies, you should skip neither Thor 2, Iron man 3, nor Guardians because the infinity stones are present in those movies and, frankly, that’s the entire plot of the final Avengers movies.
Iron Man 3 doesn’t feature an Infinity Stone. It does feature the Extremis enhancement, which certainly played a substantial role in Agents of S.H.E.I.L.D. and could come back to the story later (although they seem to have closed off that thread in the cinematic line for now). However, it is a fun road trip movie with some noir-ish elements that managed to piss off a lot of hardcore comic book nerds by subverting a major villian in typical Shane Black fashion, and also has some great humor while still extending the darkness and paranoia that is consuming and driving Stark. Well worth watching.
Stranger
Loki is even fun off-screen.