TOP Best 23 Marvel Movies Cinematic Universe
Aliens Tips
1. Iron Man (2008)
2. The Incredible Hulk (2008)
3. Iron Man 2 (2010)
4. Thor (2011)
5. Captain America: The First Avenger (2011)
6. Marvel's The Avengers (2012)
7. Iron Man 3 (2013)
8. Thor: The Dark World (2013)
9. Captain America: Winter Soldier (2014)
10. Guardians of the Galaxy (2014)
11. Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015)
12. Ant-Man (2015)
13. Doctor Strange (2016)
14. Captain America: Civil War (2016)
15. Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017)
16. Thor: Ragnarok (2017)
17. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 (2017)
18. Avengers: Infinity War (2018)
19. Ant-Man and the Wasp (2018)
20. Black Panther (2018)
21. Avengers: Endgame (2019)
22. Captain Marvel (2019)
23. Spider-Man: Far From Home (2019)
Aliens Tips
1. Iron Man (2008)
2. The Incredible Hulk (2008)
3. Iron Man 2 (2010)
4. Thor (2011)
5. Captain America: The First Avenger (2011)
6. Marvel's The Avengers (2012)
7. Iron Man 3 (2013)
8. Thor: The Dark World (2013)
9. Captain America: Winter Soldier (2014)
10. Guardians of the Galaxy (2014)
11. Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015)
12. Ant-Man (2015)
13. Doctor Strange (2016)
14. Captain America: Civil War (2016)
15. Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017)
16. Thor: Ragnarok (2017)
17. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 (2017)
18. Avengers: Infinity War (2018)
19. Ant-Man and the Wasp (2018)
20. Black Panther (2018)
21. Avengers: Endgame (2019)
22. Captain Marvel (2019)
23. Spider-Man: Far From Home (2019)
1. Iron Man (2008)
It's easy to forget that casting Robert Downey Jr. was no one's idea of a sure thing. The actor's machine-gun speaking style, archly ironic tone, and bad-boy reputation made him an awkward choice to kick-start a massive family-friendly Movie franchise. But it turned out to be a savvy move, immediately giving the Marvel films much needed cultural cred -- Downey was fresh off acclaimed comeback roles in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, A Scanner Darkly, and Zodiac -- and establishing a manic comic approach that's present in each subsequent movie. The DNA of what's to come is all here. Director Jon Favreau piles on special effects, fancy cars, and even a world-expanding post-credits stinger with Samuel L. Jackson's Nick Fury, but this is The Downey Show. You can't look away. Even with Captain America emerging as the beating heart of the Marvel Universe, Tony Stark remains its chattering id.
It's easy to forget that casting Robert Downey Jr. was no one's idea of a sure thing. The actor's machine-gun speaking style, archly ironic tone, and bad-boy reputation made him an awkward choice to kick-start a massive family-friendly Movie franchise. But it turned out to be a savvy move, immediately giving the Marvel films much needed cultural cred -- Downey was fresh off acclaimed comeback roles in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, A Scanner Darkly, and Zodiac -- and establishing a manic comic approach that's present in each subsequent movie. The DNA of what's to come is all here. Director Jon Favreau piles on special effects, fancy cars, and even a world-expanding post-credits stinger with Samuel L. Jackson's Nick Fury, but this is The Downey Show. You can't look away. Even with Captain America emerging as the beating heart of the Marvel Universe, Tony Stark remains its chattering id. |
2. The Incredible Hulk (2008)
Now that Mark Ruffalo's neurotic, emotionally wounded take on the Hulk, first introduced in The Avengers, has become canon, this Hulk solo adventure, which starred Edward Norton as temperamental genius Bruce Banner, looks like a mangy Hulk-dog in Marvel's litter. It's not horrible -- director Louis Leterrier (Transporter, Transporter 2) has an eye for grimy, kinetic action set-pieces and a winking, hammy turn from Tim Roth helps sell some ludicrous plotting -- but Norton's dark, cerebral version of the character clashes with the then-emerging Marvel house tone of gee-wiz optimism. (Reportedly, the famously collaborative actor also butted heads with the studio.) It'd be fun to declare this an underrated gem in the Marvel catalog, but the movie is just not that good. Besides, we already have Ang Lee's Hulk, a truly bizarre and fascinating work of pop-art, to celebrate.
3. Iron Man 2 (2010)
A tattooed, Russian-accented Mickey Rourke groveling with his shirt off might be the only memorable image from this overstuffed sequel. Ostensibly a movie about Robert Downey Jr.'s Tony Stark, the lecherous titan of industry, learning to live under public scrutiny as Iron Man, the Fortune 500 militarized superhero, Iron Man 2 is really more of an exercise in corporate brand-building. Samuel L. Jackson's Nick Fury and Scarlett Johansson's Black Widow, two characters who have been historically underserved by the larger Marvel movie machine, are mostly on hand to set up future sequels and eat up screen time. In hindsight, the film's screenplay, which was penned by The Leftovers star Justin Theroux, is notable for one reason: It was the first Marvel film to emphasize concepts like "connectivity" and "serialization" at the expense of dynamic storytelling and character development. The formula of effects-driven spectacle, fan-friendly Easter eggs, and sitcom style gags developed by super-producer Kevin Feige wasn't perfected yet. Like Tony Stark, they were still tinkering with their product -- and sometimes that means it blows up in your face.
4. Thor (2011)
Bringing in classicist Kenneth Branagh to give Marvel's godly hero a canted, Shakespearean touch made perfect sense. Same with casting Chris Hemsworth, bulky, blonde, and unfamiliar enough to audiences that his accidental descent to Earth felt like a surprise. The revered Natalie Portman playing brilliant and romantic? Perfect. The maniacal Tom Hiddleston? Another on-point discovery. So what happened with Thor? Too contained to make good on the promise of grand fantasy (jumping from Asgard to middle-of-nowhere New Mexico was... a choice) and rarely vicious enough to let Hemsworth and Hiddleston channel the Bard, the movie is a flat, endless road to Avengers land in desperate need of a Bifrost scenic route. The silver lining: Hemsworth and Portman, the only superhero screen couple to replicate the romance of Christopher Reeves and Margot Kidder in 1978 Superman.
5. Captain America: The First Avenger (2011)
Captain America's introduction isn't the jokiest or zippiest or most action-packed entry in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but like super-soldier Steve Rogers, it's a laboratory-made throwback with equal parts heart, soul, and muscle. To put it bluntly: It's an honest-to-goodness movie in a mega-franchise full of piggybacking installments. Under the eye of Joe Johnston, who melds the throwback glimmer of The Rocketeer with the phantasmagoria of the Red Skull and his laser-blasting HYDRA cronies, The First Avenger gifts Chris Evans a meaty role. For emasculated wannabe Steve, becoming "The Captain" takes more than beefed-up, Nazi-pounding brawn. The journey towards self-sacrifice pairs him with Peggy Carter, a secret agent who makes our hero into her romantic interest, and puts him through the death of his best friend -- a move that, even sequels later, weighs on the character. Practical fight effects, a spine-tingling makeup job for Hugo Weaving's villain, and Alan Silvestri's rousing score give The First Avenger an iconic polish, but in the end, it's Evans who wields the shield with a sincerity that most superhero movies -- hell, most Hollywood blockbusters -- don't dare to summon.
6. Marvel's The Avengers (2012)
To a certain type of comic book fan, the mere existence of a movie like The Avengers is a miracle. There had been movies and TV shows that teamed up superheroes before -- Mystery Men goofed on the premise back in the '90s -- but no one had ever assembled a squad of do-gooders with the same level of gravitas and scale. Watching Captain America, Iron Man, The Hulk, Thor, Black Widow, Nick Fury, and, yes, even Jeremy Renner's put-upon Hawkeye trade punches, secrets, and Joss Whedon's self-aware banter felt like a seismic rupture in nerd-dom's space-time continuum. Looking back, the movie's impact and influence on Hollywood moviemaking might be more negative than positive, as anyone who endured Suicide Squad can testify, but, for a brief moment, Marvel's carefully rolled out monument to itself stood tall and proud.
7. Iron Man 3 (2013)
Robert Downey Jr.'s Kiss Kiss Bang Bang writer-director Shane Black polarized audiences with his gun-toting take on the character: Marvel diehards waited three episodes to finally see Iron Man's classic (and problematic?) villain The Mandarin only to have the rug pulled out from under them by Ben Kingsley's deadbeat thespian switcheroo. We couldn't have been happier -- after a Part 2 mired by politics and world-building, Black's back-to-basics approach arms Tony Stark with self-referential wit, cripples him with anxiety, and sends the power armor through hell and back. (The airplane free-fall rescue remains one of the most spectacular sequences in Marvel history). Clunky third-act twists be damned, the contrast between light-on-the-toes comedic action with the unnerving threat of terrorism is proof that popcorn movies can still have bite.
8. Thor: The Dark World (2013)
The purpose was clear: Marvel hired veteran Game of Thrones director Alan Taylor to give Thor an epic, fantasy facelift in the vein of the HBO phenomenon. Dark magic, sword fights galore, and a grit familiar to fans of DC's comic book movies replaced the romance and fish-out-of-water comedy of the first installment. Thank Odin for Hemsworth and Portman's chemistry and the fanciful evil of Hiddleston's Loki; the overly complicated plot to extract a liquid Infinity Stone known as the Aehter out of Jane muddies Christopher Eccleston's villain, Malekith the Accursed, and forces The Dark World to end on another portal-filled, near-apocalypse moment. But the relationships are everything, and Loki's shift to Hannibal Lecter mode gives this sequel a dramatic high that can back up the special effects.
9. Captain America: Winter Soldier (2014)
As TV professionals, brothers/directors Anthony and Joe Russo have a keen sense of how episodic series function, and how singular entries in those series must bend the rules to pop. The logic that fuels a random episode of Arrested Development also applies to Winter Soldier; from the cheeky start to the crashing-helicarrier finish, the Russos guide Cap through a twisty, adrenaline-pumping hunt for truth, echoing '70s paranoia thrillers and Bourne set pieces, while never deviating too far from the Marvel playbook. The movie gets out of Chris Evans and Scarlett Johansson's way, whose rat-a-tat chemistry is more like the '60s Avengers than the comic book counterparts. The movie goes batshit crazy -- Toby Jones' Zola is a supercomputer! Garry Shandling whispers "Hail, Hydra"! -- and we know exactly how it'll end. But following Evans and Johansson, with occasional spurts of Sam Jackson fire, has the warm, fuzzy feeling of that TV episode you go back to over and over again. With $199 million added to the budget.
10. Guardians of the Galaxy (2014)
Guardians of the Galaxy is a wet fart of American rudeness in the grand tradition of Bart Simpson, Cartman, and those bumper stickers with Calvin peeing on things. Writer and director James Gunn, a spiky-haired genre nut with a background in Troma, was recruited to adapt one of Marvel's more obscure properties about a ragtag gang of space criminals including a talking tree, a green alien, and a gun-toting raccoon. Like the even more foul-mouthed Deadpool, which pushed the envelope into R-rated territory, Guardians is a comedy predicated on the audience's awareness of comic book conventions, tropes, and cliches it can playfully tweak. There's no Chris Pratt rolling his eyes as Star-Lord without Robert Downey Jr. smirking as Iron Man first. But for all the spirited irreverence, the movie's greatest asset is actually the blend of sentimentality and nostalgia evoked by the '80s jams on the soundtrack. Once you're hooked on the feeling, there's no going back.
11. Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015)
It's difficult to remember what actually happens in Avengers: Age of Ultron, the film that reportedly broke the spirit of writer-and-director Joss Whedon, but the act of watching it can be oddly exhilarating. The constantly swirling camera movements! The fake nation of Sokovia! The weird part on the farm with Linda Cardellini! The quips! (So many quips!) Whedon's willingness to push scenes into the realm of horror and occasionally grapple with the thorny moral implications of all this militarized chaos -- "Every time someone tries to win a war before it starts, innocent people die," says Captain America at one point -- allows the film to critique certain grandiose notions of heroism, bravery, and loyalty. It's an event movie embarrassed by its own lumbering gait. That sense of shame doesn't save Whedon's last hurrah from devolving into a gluttonous buffet of side plots, sequel setups, and slugfests, but it does make for a bracing study in disaster capitalism.
12. Ant-Man (2015)
With his combination of leading man good looks and near-constant expression of wry bemusement, Paul Rudd is an ideal modern superhero. He's both in on the joke and the butt of it. Most importantly, he looks equally cool and dumb in a tricked-out ant costume. While many tears were shed when Edgar Wright left the project in the development stage, director Peyton Reed (Down With Love) gives the origin story surrounding Rudd's performance as Scott Lang a bouncy rhythm and mischievous sense of humor. His transition from small-time crook to even smaller crimefighter is emotionally satisfying, narratively brisk, and completely absurd. (The Thomas the Tank Engine gag in the finale remains in a class by itself.) Plus, Ant-Man is one of the few Marvel movies where all the actors are having fun on the same frequency, with Michael Douglas, Evangeline Lilly, and especially scene-stealer Michael Peña turning the film into Marvel's version of Ocean's Eleven.
13. Doctor Strange (2016)
If Marvel can craft a special-effects-driven mega-blockbuster out of Doctor Strange, a Greenwich Village-dwelling sorcerer dreamed up by Steve Ditko in 1963, they can make a movie out of anything. Director Scott Derrickson (Sinister) doesn't exactly double down on the comic's trippy imagery or capture the character's beatnik appeal -- mainstream audiences and Disney investors aren't exactly looking for a Jodorowsky film with capes -- but he does stage some appropriately mind-bending, kid-friendly bursts of psychedelic trickery. The Inception-style cityscapes folding in on themselves are striking, and the film's finale, where Strange bends time to create an infinite loop in the Dark Dimension, is the rare third act in a Marvel film that's more fun than what preceded it. Strange's arc from jerk to gent, deftly played by a rakish Benedict Cumberbatch, is cut from the Iron Man cloth, but the stitching is more intricate than it probably needs to be at this point. That's commendable.
14. Captain America: Civil War (2016)
The promotional material for the third Captain America movie, which resembles an Avengers film in both scale and tone, promised a showdown between #TeamCap and #TeamIronMan, with fans encouraged to pick sides. But with its $1 billion-plus worldwide box office haul, the real winner was obviously #TeamMoney. As a piece of corporate synergy -- not to mention a document of Hollywood deal-brokering and celebrity ego-massaging -- Captain America: Civil War is a shiny, market-tested achievement. As a movie, it feels like the cliffhanger-filled season finale of a long-running TV series you mostly watch out of a dogged sense of obligation. Beyond the much-hyped airport battle sequence, which contains some delightful comic book acrobatics and maybe the funniest three seconds in any Marvel movie, the 147-minute saga is a long battle where little is gained and less is learned.
15. Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017)
Paraded around as the company's stab at a "John Hughes movie," Spider-Man: Homecoming understands the scale and sensibility needed for the friendly, neighborhood crime-fighter to take web-enabled flight. This Peter Parker, played by actual-young-person Tom Holland, is a bodega-sandwich-eating kid from Queens, an overachieving student, a hormonal wreck, and a superpowered child dying to prove himself to the adults in the room. He makes mistakes. He overshoots. And it's not until his blue-collar adversary, a scrap-salvager-turned-arms-dealer willing to steal from the government to get his, turns out to be his prom date's dad that the adventure feels life or death. Vibrant, sly, and gleefully elastic, Homecoming staves off the cosmic Marvel universe for a transportive, microcosmic alternative with an unspoken lesson: With great power comes great responsibility.
