I’d say we’re currently in a dip, but that it started with Age of Ultron.
A:AoU:
Tony: Let’s play around with the mind-controlling godstick!
Bruce: Okay.
Tony: Let’s solve this problem by doing exactly the same thing that caused this problem in the first place!
Bruce: Okay.
CA:CW:
Tony: We must now submit to the same kind of authorities that would have nuked New York. Even though supervision would have prevented none of our previous problems (except for me playing around with the mind-controlling godstick).
Ant-Man: I’m here! Which team am I on?
Tony: This fight involved two people whose powers can distort the very nature of reality. Death is a likely result. I’m going to bring a teenager into this fight.
Tony: He killed my mom! We must therefore fight to the death. Steve, you think that’s a stupid idea? We must therefore fight to the death.
I’m not going to hate too much on Ant-Man or Doctor Strange, because they’re (yet more) origin stories, so I might just be having origin story fatigue, but there were serious problems with Age of Ultron and Civil War.
Age of Ultron was a giant misstep for Marvel, we could talk about that one all day. Civil War was fairly serviceable, the parts of it that worked for me i really loved. The parts that didn’t weren’t as painful to watch as Ultron. Though they did an excellent job with writing Bucky, Scarlet Witch & Black Panther… Spiderman & Ant-Man felt slapped on but i didn’t hate them in it.
The particulars of the plot for that movie definitely could’ve been better but it surpassed my expectations so i’ll give it a pass. I was expecting Ultron quality
I think the worst part of the last few movies is that we’re supposed to be ratcheting up the tension to Infinity War, but the tension doesn’t feel any higher now than it did after Winter Soldier. I get that Civil War was supposed to accomplish that by dividing the Avengers, but it undermined that entirely with the cell phone trick at the end.
Also, can I just discuss how ridiculous it is that, during the events of The Avengers, there were no fewer than four Infinity Gems on Earth? Out of all of the nine realms, out of the vast entirety of the universe, four of the six gems that, together, give their possessor ultimate power, are just lying around a planet that has been otherwise utterly unremarkable until about eighty years ago.
Yeah the last act doesn’t quite work for me. However i’ll give them some credit for not killing the main antagonist, or having him don some ultimate power or piece of tech. The misdirection on his part was also fairly convincing, though they would’ve done the story better service by making the audience feel for him but his backstory is hardly touched on.
It’s always fun to see heroes and villains with different powers duke it out but relatable characters and narrative logic both go out the window as soon as the Gods start showing up.
Captain America: I can run as fast as any Olympian and I can’t get drunk!
Vision: Good for you. I have nearly unlimited strength, flight, invulnerability, superhuman intellect, the ability to phase through solid matter, I can shoot death beams out of my face, alter my own physical structure, wirelessly hack any computer system in existence, and can wield Thor’s hammer. My abilities derive from a mysterious artifact of such immeasurable power that it has destroyed interplanetary civilizations and is coveted by galactic warlords.
Hawkeye: Check out how good I am at shooting a bow and arrow!
Yeah, Loki remains the only antagonist that the MCU has attempted to really get us to empathize with (which is a large reason why he’s such a great antagonist, to the point that he’s overused in the MCU).
It looks like they might be trying to go in that direction with Mordo, which would be awesome.
Tarkin figures fairly heavily in both Disney cartoon series. With all the other nods to the cartoons in Rogue One, they kinda painted themselves into a corner with that character.
As for new EU (and getting this thread back on topic), I think there’s plenty of room for some exploration of the Mandalorians Not Surnamed Fett.
They still didn’t need to give him all that screen time though. The Emperor was understood to be a major force in the original trilogy but we didn’t see him at all in the first movie and just saw a short holographic teleconference with him in the second.
I think they could’ve gotten around the CGI fake Tarkin by having him communicate via hologram in key scenes that he had to directly chastise Krennic and threaten to take over the Deathstar.
