KJ

The previously-discussed MCU rewatch has begun! We powered through Phase One on Tuesday night, first watching Captain America: The First Avenger, then a few clips from Iron Man, Iron Man 2, and Thor, and finally The Avengers. And we were up way too late for a school night, but it was worth it. Although I don't know that I got anything particularly new out of it, it was fun to watch my friends making new connections and to explain the significance of things. My obsessions expertise, being put to good use!

One thought I do want to share is this: I no longer really think that Thor is optional to a good understanding of the MCU. If nothing else, The Avengers makes way, way more sense after you've spent some time getting to know Thor and Loki, both individually and in the context of their relationship. If you're going to skip something, make it Iron Man 2 (although you might want to check out some of the scenes between Tony and Rhodey, and Tony and Nick Fury). Thor is officially back on the required watching list.

Next up is Winter Soldier (yay!) and Guardians of the Galaxy (...oh, all right). I'll be sure to report back.

This next batch of episodes takes me up to Age of Ultron, which is of course just now coming out of theaters -- it's playing in literally one theater near me, and it's not one I can easily get to. And it's not out on streaming until September. Boo.

Anyway, the show. The thing I love most about this stretch is the discovery that the first two seasons of Agents of SHIELD are Skye's origin story. ( Spoilers, length )

Still haven't decided what to do next. But for right now, it's time to go see Ant-Man.

Now that the second season of Agents of SHIELD is up on Netflix, I've decided to pick up this project where I left off, with my third viewing of Guardians of the Galaxy.

This is not a particular favorite of mine -- it's a fun ride, easily the most humorous of the MCU films, and I enjoyed it while I was watching. Chris Pratt is always charming, and like everyone I fell totally in love with Groot, but the film's frat-boy attitude gets wearying, fast. Basically, I stand by everything that I said the first time, except that Ronin has grown on me as an antagonist. In particular, I would no longer say that Ronin was a worse antagonist than Maeferoth: he might be a bit annoying and over the top, but he has a much stronger personality, and I got a better feel for his motives the third time around. I still wish we had gotten more on Nebula and the Collector, and I hope we see them both in later movies.

( Cut for Agents of SHIELD spoilerish stuff )

I love this movie, okay? Just pure fangirl squeeish love. Marvel might have been able to make a more perfect follow up to Cap 1 and The Avengers in terms of what I wanted as a Steve Rogers fangirl, but I have a hard time imagining what it might have been. So I have a hard time being objective. Also, I've written about this film before, both right after I first saw it and on my second viewing, in the context of a smaller rewatch (TFA, Avengers, and the first two post-TWS episodes).

I took exactly two notes as I was watching, one about how seamlessly Steve and Natasha work together, despite their contrasts in personality and style, and one about Jasper Sitwell. ( A few thoughts on Sitwell. )

As for the rest, well, what can I say? The character development of Steve, Natasha, and Nick Fury follow just right from the rest of the series. Pierce and HYDRA make for the best MCU antagonists so far (except for Loki, of course). Sam is exactly the right new character at the right time -- someone outside all the power structures we already know, able to bring a fresh new perspective and be a friend to Steve. The business with Bucky carries the perfect amount of emotional punch. ( Cut for future movie speculation. )

And so this project takes a pause in the same place it began, with fangirling over a Captain America movie. Appropriate, I think. :) There's more to rewatch, and I think I probably will continue, but for now I have tickets to Age of Ultron tomorrow at 10pm. See you on the other side.

The first and only other time that I'd seen this movie was in the theater, and I never got around to buying it on disc. (I do own Iron Man 3, but mostly for the Agent Carter short, which I didn't look at for the rewatch mostly because we don't yet know where it fits in the overall timeline.) Not because I don't like it -- I do, and like the first Thor movie I think it's somewhat underrated. But I don't feel the need to watch it again and again like I do some of the other films.

That said, I enjoyed revisiting it, even though I didn't really notice much in the way of interesting new connections. Pretty much everything I said in my initial reaction shot holds. On reflection, I wish they had given Darcy and especially Sif more to do, and not shoehorned Jane into the damsel role for so much of the film, and though I'm always complaining about comic book movies and how they never kill off characters for real (I'm especially looking at you, Phil Coulson) ( cutting for a spoiler ). The other thing I neglected to mention in my initial post is how flat the villains were. Any Thor villain is going to suffer in comparison to Loki, but we get so little of a window into Malekith, his character or his motivations (beyond your standard "revenge" and "let's destroy the world because we can", which are so generic that I don't think they really count) that it was impossible to care about him. Such a waste of Christopher Eccleston.

I've actually watched a good chunk of Agents of SHIELD Season One in the last few days, so look for a post on that soon. And then: Winter Soldier, yay!

And now we get to the entire reason I'm even here. Iron Man might have been the instigator of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and I'd been watching from pretty much the beginning, but my first viewing of The Avengers was the event that took me from "person who enjoys a series of movies" to full-blown fangirl. Not until The Avengers did I start writing fic, poring through reams of meta and writing my own, squeeing non-stop over gifsets on Tumblr. A combination, I think, of a few things: a fun and appealing team dynamic, the characterization of Steve Rogers hitting just the right notes in my fic writing brain, an exciting new pairing in Clint/Natasha, and having a whole bunch of people on Tumblr to fangirl with. Fandom is at its best as a community experience, and it's not often that I've been catapulted into the rush of a new fandom with so many other people at once. (The closest I can think of is Cinders, and that was on a much smaller scale.)

Because I am so fannish about this movie, and I feel like I've spilled quite a lot of virtual ink on it already (though mostly on Tumblr, therefore making it somewhat difficult to find), I'm not sure how much I have to say about this rewatch, but a few thoughts.

( Is there anyone who hasn't seen this movie and would care about spoilers? Well, I'll cut it just in case. )

I watched Iron Man 2 on Thursday, shortly after writing up my Incredible Hulk post, and found that I took almost no notes while watching it. I probably should have waited longer to watch it after the first Iron Man, since I sort of expanded my thoughts on that movie into things that happened in this one, so going too deeply into all that feels repetitive. But, a few things:

( Cut for spoilers, length, etc. )

That's about it, really. On to Thor, probably sometime next week.

If it seems like I'm moving through these quickly, it's because I might be starting a short-term job sometime soon, and I don't know how much free time I'll have after this week. And when I get my teeth into a project, I like to keep moving on it. Pacing myself has never been one of my great skills. ;) If I get way ahead of schedule, maybe I'll watch more episodes of Agents of SHIELD.

So, Iron Man! Where it all started. It's easy to forget, so many years and films later, that without the commercial and critical success of this movie, we wouldn't even have a Marvel Cinematic Universe. I think I've probably seen this more times than any other MCU film (except maybe The Avengers), in part because it's the oldest, in part because it's on TV a lot, and in part because it's T's favorite film in the series, so it's the one he's most likely to watch. I might also argue that it's the best film of the lot, in terms of a piece of filmmaking, except for CA: TWS -- it's certainly one of the more tightly written, the pacing is excellent, and it has one of the better villains in Stane. Even now, after TWS, this is my benchmark superhero film, the one against which all others are judged.

And yet, much as I like it, Iron Man isn't a movie I was fannish about when I first watched it, or for some time after. I paged a bit through my archives to see if I'd ever done a full write-up of Iron Man, and as far as I can tell I didn't even mention the Marvel Cinematic Universe on LJ/DW until I watched The First Avenger, and even that was a throwaway -- I didn't get truly sucked into the series until The Avengers. (Perhaps not surprisingly, my first Tumblr reblog tagged "iron man" is a character study of Tony based on that movie.) But of course it is a part of my fandom now, both individually and as part of the greater whole. I might be a Steve girl, but that doesn't mean that I don't see Tony's charms, especially as played by Robert Downey, Jr. (who might as well have been born to play Tony Stark), or love Rhodey to bits, or ship Tony/Pepper and Tony/Rhodey (and all three of them together) like it's going out of style.

So that's the background; now some thoughts about the actual movie, and its relationship to the rest of the series.

( Spoilers for, like, everything. )

I devoured the first five episodes yesterday. They were even better the second time through, and I'm excited to get to the rest. (Although it occurs to me that it was maybe a mistake to schedule this project at the same time that Daredevil is coming out.)

I realized today that I never did write any Agent Carter posts after my initial reaction shot, so I'll start with some general thoughts first.

So, this show is really great. Peggy Carter was already one of my favorite characters and this show has just cemented her onto my all-time list. Jarvis is wonderful, I love their dynamic. I adore Angie, and the way her relationship with Peggy helps ground Peggy into the real world, outside the pressure cooker of the SSR. I appreciate Sousa -- it's nice for Peggy to have a colleague who's a little better than the others, someone we can see as a future possibly ally and friend (and love interest? Although so far the show has been framing Angie as the most likely candidate for that role, which is fantastic), but he has decided flaws, of the sort that make him more interesting and well-rounded as a character. I even find myself liking Dooley and Thompson a little bit more this time through. I wouldn't say that I like either of them, but I like how their characters grow, the bits of backstory we get, and how they start seeing Peggy for the skilled agent she is -- although you get the sense that they're thinking her as an exception to the rule, not developing a new-found respect for the abilities of women. Basically, what I'm saying is that there are very few one-note characters here, and I really like that.

Rewatch thoughts:

( Cutting for spoilers )