Marvel Cinematic Universe

I’m not a big comic books fan. Sure, I read some when I was growing up but I was always a movie buff.

My tastes in movies varied. I was always the weird kid on the block. If everyone else loved a teen comedy I was watching old science fiction serials on videotape. My friends came over to make fun of Buck Rogers and the Secret Empire, but they watched those old flicks with me.

One of my high school buddies called me up a few years ago and said, “Tommy, you should be in Jumanji! That movie is all about you.”

And he’s right. I live in an alternate world, a parallel universe. My heart is always somewhere else because it’s never in the mundane world.

2008’s Iron Man introduced me to the MCU. I’m still confused about how the 2 older Hulk movies are supposed to fit in with the MCU. They weren’t very good. Something about Iron Man made me sit up and think, hm…they could be on to something.

Jon Favreau kicked off the most successful movie franchise in history. Sure, George Lucas did something special with Star Wars, but his fans became so toxic I lost interest in the SW universe. You can’t please a bunch of numb-witted whiney people who are never pleased by anything.

The MCU has its critics but it’s not as divided as the SWU. That’s all I’ll say about that.

My friend Michael Martinez has a SciFi Movies Blog with a whole section devoted to the MCU. It could be a lot better and I’ve told him so. He’s the kind of guy who loves to start things and hates to stay with them. He gets bored in the middle of a sentence, unless it’s about Tolkien. The guy writes more stuff about Middle-earth than anyone I’ve ever seen. If you’ve never seen the Middle-earth blog, you don’t know what you’re missing.

A lot of directors have done great work in the MCU. Taika Waititi revolutionized Thor – just absolutely took that character to a whole new level. Sure, he used a lot of material from the comic books. He gave Hulk fans the Planet Hulk story they had been begging for over years and years.

Just gotta love Waititi, and he appears as a character in the movies, too.

But if one director stands out above the others, it’s got to be James Gunn. Michael and I were talking about comic book movie directors last year and he said he’d wanted to write a blog post about his favorite superhero directors. I told him that was a great idea!

I had to prod and beg a few times but he finally wrote Top Directors of Superhero Movies in December. This is a fantastic review of his favorite directors, and I’m glad it includes James Gunn.

Gunn had to migrate the MCU into space. Other Marvel projects were taking the characters into space. Avengers sent Tony Start through a wormhole, and Thor’s Asgard is another world. But the Guardians of the Galaxy are a special group. They’re not bound to a home world the way other heroes are.

If anything, they’ve all lost their home worlds – or in Rocket’s case never really had one.

James Gunn had to create an entire galaxy around these characters. Sure, he’s using a ton of material from the comic books. But he’s the guy who has to tie it all together. He has to create a vision for the galaxy that works with the rest of the MCU and and he has to entertain audiences.

The stories he’s told so far are great. The characters are great. And he’s brought fictional space technology forward or back to where it should be – there as background for the main story. These movies don’t waste a lot of time idolizing machines with drama and mystery. People get in the spaceship and go. And they always have a gizmo to fix things so the story can keep moving forward.

What I love about Marvel’s Cinematic Universe is that it treats all possibilities as if they are realistic. You don’t have a lot of character drama over what’s possible. They had some fun with the drama in Avengers: Endgame, where the Hulk argued with Ant-man about how time travel works.

Truth is, no one knows how time travel works. Einstein says it’s possible – mathematically. As far as I am concerned, you could be a Dr. Who fan and you’ve explained time travel as well as you need to. I mean, other than for laughs, there is no need to do a movie around how time travel is supposed to work – or not.

Space travel really needs to be treated the same way. If you want to set a movie in space, just put your people in a spaceship and send them to the stars. Don’t worry about what we think is possible today.

Arthur C. Clarke gave the movie industry a perfect out, and the MCU uses it almost everywhere: Any sufficiently advanced technology seems like magic. That’s all they really need for these movies: a lot of magical technology that can’t be explained to the audience.

I don’t think anyone has a problem with Iron Man’s propulsors, or Thor’s hammer. They just work. And that’s the way it is with all Favreau MCU movies and what came after them.

They just work.