Revisiting Older MCU Movies Highlights Its Problems

Back in May for no real reason I started rewatching some of the movies I own on Amazon, most because I got a digital copy when I bought the Blu-Ray/DVD.  It really started with Force Awakens on May 4th but then eventually I got to some of the MCU movies I own, which I haven't rewatched very often.

When I rewatched Age of Ultron and Ant-Man & the Wasp some of the problems with the MCU occurred to me.  The biggest problem is even when they started doing 2-3 movies a year, that's still very little storytelling time versus the comics.  Because a comic book series usually has one issue a month or sometimes bi-weekly or (rarely) even weekly.  Characters--especially Spider-Man--often appear in multiple books too, both solo and team books.  That gives the writers plenty of chances to develop stories and characters.

But with the movies, there wasn't much of that so the stories tend to be pretty thin with some subplots and characters that didn't see much development or really have much payoff.  Like in Age of Ultron there's a whole subplot about Black Widow and Dr. Banner hooking up.  Which led to...nothing.  Hulk disappears until showing up in Thor Ragnarok 2 1/2 years later.  When Widow and Banner are finally reunited in Infinity War six months after that, nothing is really mentioned about that. 

Also in Age of Ultron a new Avengers team is formed with War Machine, Falcon, Vision, Scarlet Witch, Black Widow, and Captain America.  That team gets exactly 1 onscreen mission (which they bungle) in Civil War a year later and then they're broken up.  So not much of a payoff there.

Scarlet Witch was introduced in Age of Ultron but didn't really get much development other than to say her parents died and she got funky powers.  Vision saves her in the end and then in Civil War they have a couple of scenes before choosing different sides.  And then for some reason they're together in Scotland in Infinity War and then Vision dies and then Scarlet Witch dies until being brought back in the end of Endgame.  Then there was the whole WandaVision thing that just brought in a bunch of stuff out of left field to make her more into the comic book version.  And then she does a heel turn in Dr. Strange 2 before dying. It was overall just some real half-assed character work for her and Vision, who had even less opportunity to develop.

Watching Ant-Man & the Wasp the problem with this whole franchise has been its connection to the MCU.  After the first movie, which only had one forced MCU cameo, the Ant-Man universe is thrown into disarray when he goes to Germany in Civil War and gets arrested.  Then there was the whole Endgame thing and the MCU's desperate need to establish Kang as the next big bad--how did that work out?  So if you think about it, the series never had a chance to progress naturally because they had to keep working around all the MCU stuff.  Ant-Man & the Wasp was still good because it didn't have to do too much but Quantumania had to take on so much MCU business that it really sunk the whole thing.

And thinking about it, the Russos probably did more to fuck up the MCU than anyone.  In their first outing, Winter Soldier, they destroyed SHIELD, which fucked up the TV series at the time.  And also it limited the usefulness of characters like Nick Fury and Maria Hill.  Then in Civil War they broke up the Avengers team established only about a year earlier and had several characters end up imprisoned.  Then in Infinity War half the universe is destroyed.  Then in Endgame there's the infamous "blip" where all these people were brought back--but lost 5 years.  That really fucked up the movies and TV shows that came out after, most of which had to in some way address that problem.

Of course they did all that with the blessing of Kevin Feige, but there were a lot of unintended consequences that other movies/TV shows had to deal with.  And really that probably weakened the storytelling a bit, which you could say has contributed to their slump in the last couple of years.

Anyway, I'm just saying when you look back, you can see where the overall plots are sometimes pretty thin and things don't really pay off and characters aren't really given time to grow.  What the MCU has accomplished is still pretty amazing, but it's definitely not perfect.