Captain America: The First Avenger (2011) took us back to the 1940s and the second world war, and the arms race between Germany and the Allies. Make no mistake, this was one of the most creative periods in history in terms of innovation, and both sides really were investigating human enhancement as well as engineering improvements. It’s just that the Americans mostly used volunteers, and the Nazis… well, we all know what they did to the Roma and the Jews, plus dissidents from

Thor (2011) represented a big change of pace for the fledgling MCU. Bringing Kenneth Branagh, Shakespearean actor and director, on to direct and giving him effectively completely creative control meant Thor looked very different to the previous MCU movies… and indeed any other superhero movie made before, or since. The Asgard scenes are very Shakespearean in their setting and scope, and the actors Branagh chose really did them justice, as does Patrick Doyle’s amazing musical

Returning to direct Iron Man 2, Jon Favreau delivered a movie that wasn’t particularly well-received at the time even though it made excellent profits ($623 million off a $200 million budget), but works really well in hindsight. It has some interesting parallels with A Christmas Carol (bear with me here) in that Justin Hammer and Ivan Vanko are representative of Tony Stark’s past and possible future, respectively. Hammer is who Stark used to be, or a pale shadow of it; hard-p

After the spectacular success of Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk was a pretty big mis-step for Marvel, even though they proclaimed it a commercial success. Part of the problem was the casting of Edward Norton, who just seems too quiet and diminutive for the role of Bruce Banner. Mark Ruffalo probably isn’t much bigger physically, but he dominates the space around him with a force or personality Norton just doesn’t have. The movie made $263 million worldwide off a $150 million b

Even looking back over a decade later, it’s hard to find a lot to criticize about Jon Favreau’s Iron Man. When you consider that Marvel went with a very dangerous choice of actor in the recently-rehabbed Robert Downey Jr., to play a third-tier comic book character and spent $140 million making the movie, it really was one helluva gamble. Of course, the gamble paid off. Iron Man grossed over $580 million at the box office, the second biggest movie of 2008 behind The Dark Knigh