Summer Movie Epicness!

As a comic book fan, you could not have asked for a better summer.  Three big screen debuts and a sorta reboot of a dying franchise.  Thor, Captain America and Green Lantern made their first big screen debuts and some were better than others.  X-Men First Class was a much needed reboot after X3 crashed and burned into a flaming pile of Phoenix droppings.  Each movie a stand alone beginning of a new run of superhero films that will hopefully only get better.  So I’m gonna run through the four movies, giving my unbiased opinion (yeah right) on each one in the order I saw the films.

THOR.  Right off the bat I gotta say this is a good movie.  A solid film and one of Marvels best.  A little of my history with Thor, I never followed him as a kid growing up.  Just thought he was a big goofy guy with a big hammer and ugly costume.  It was not until recently reading J. Michael Stracznski’s run of Thor that I started to fully love the character, with the help of Oliver Coipel’s art.  So going into this movie that is what I had ingrained in my head as to what I wanted to see in this movie.  And I do think that it got there to a degree and I’ll get to that.

What I loved about THOR.  Visually its a pretty great movie.  I saw this twice, once in 3D and once in 2D.  Didn’t feel a difference, so 3D was not worth the money.  Either way, it looked great.  I loved Sif and the Warriors Three.  Their casting was great, and I loved that they where allowed to be funny, I loved how they interacted with eatchother, and I loved them in the action sequences.  I loved Tom Hiddleston as Loki.  I thought he did such a great job as the second rate brother of Thor, and then turned villain.  And honestly how could you not like Idris Elba as Heimdall.  One last thing I thought was perfect was the Destroyer.  It was quite epic.

What I disliked about THOR.  Thor.  I had 2 issues with Thor, the lack of the helmet and the cheese ball acting.  In seeing all the trailers of Thor with no helmet I was a little bummed but got over it.  What I had assumed and had been told by others was that in this movie his costume was going to be more based on the regular Marvel Universe and not the Ultimates and in The Avengers, he was going to be full Ultimates, even minus the cape.  Then when Thor entered that great hall in the movie, rocking the helmet I was pretty surprised and happy to see it.  And that was IT.  Never worn again fighting the frost giants, and it was not returned to him with his full armor once he was grated his powers back on earth.  I know its a nitpick nerd thing, but I just couldn’t help it.  It bothered me.

I hated the brevity of Thor’s banishment.  He was banished, and completely stripped of his powers, and then a weekend getaway with Jane and a blast from the Destroyer’s uni-brow and he completely sees the errors of his ways and is given his armor (sans helmet) and his hammer again.  Meh.

As much as I love Natalie Portman, she was boring.  Kat Dennings, a waste of screen time.  Chris Hemsworth, I thought in the beginning, was the perfect cast for Thor.  I had not seen anything else from him since the first 5 minutes of Star Trek.  And in those 5 minutes, there was more sold acting than the entirety of Thor.  I didn’t need a musclebound Kurt Cobaine winking at me every five minutes for me to like Thor.
Apart from my personal, and opinion based dislikes, THOR is a good movie.  At the time of seeing this, Iron Man was my favorite Marvel movie, THOR takes second.

X-MEN: FIRST CLASS.  Another good, solid Marvel movie.  I enjoyed the visuals very much in this movie.  I love everything about the cast.  I loved the story. And coming off of X3, and being completely frustrated with that series, this was definitely a breath of fresh air.

Having said that, it has numerous flaws.  The main one to me is having Alex Summers in it.  Where the hell is Scott?

One of the main reasons I was most excited about this was the thought of the reboot to the series, accept they used actual footage from the first trilogy AND had some same actors/characters as well with the cameos by Hugh and Rebecca. Which took the whole reboot/refresh out of the picture for me, which would make this some sort of prequel, thus causing MAJOR flaws.  Why oh why did they have to reference the first trilogy?!

Beast.  Nuf said.

Once again, apart from my general dislikes, this is a very good film.

GREEN LANTERN.  This movie got some major negative reviews about it, and honestly, they were mostly right.  So I won’t rehash what you have already heard.  Yes its slightly boring, visuals are a little off, acting is par.  With that said, I loved this movie, because I’m a DC fanboy and have been looking forward to this since announcement.  I was just so excited to see this get made that it was going to take something insane for me to not like it.  That’s just the truth.

Here’s what I liked the best.  Oa.  It looked great.  Loved seeing all of the lantern corps.  Mark Strong as Sinestro was excellent.  Michael Clarke Duncan voicing Kilowog was perfect.  Loved the lanterns constructs.

Things I personally disliked, Ryan Reynolds, Blake Lively, and Peters Sarsgaard.  Outside of Green Lantern, I don’t mind them.  All were meh in the movie, and I had already had it in my mind that I did not like Reynolds as Hal going into the movie.  I hated the CGI of the Guardians.  And I hated the giant turd that was Parallax.

Green Lantern for the non fanboys was a disappointment, probably because they where tainted by others opinions before going in, but in the end, this is still one of the best superhero movies to date, and I look forward to whats next with the Sinestro Corps!

CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE FIRST AVENGER. This, movie, was, FLAWLESS!  I absolutely loved every second of it.  This is the best Marvel movie to date.  My problem with writing about this is I could go on and on about this movie.  Here are my main highlights…

Chris Evans.  I HATED the fact that he was going to be Steve Rogers.  He was Johnny Storm, he had his chance.  Evans pleasantly surprised me.  THIS was the superhero he was meant to be.  The CGI that made him puny Steve Rogers was amazing, and near flawless (it felt weird at some points), and his portrayal as Captain America was exactly what I had hoped for.

Hugo Weaving as Red Skull was so very epic its not even funny.  Red Skull was one of my absolute favorite villains as a kid, and finally seeing this on the big screen was very exciting.  The makeup, CGI, whatever they used to make him look the way he looked was perfect.

We must not forget Bucky and the Howling Commandos!  They were so good, and so fun.

Captain America stole the summer, and lest we forget The Avengers teaser at the end as well.  For me the summer would be ranked as follows from best to least best… Cap, Green Lantern, X-Men, and THOR.  The only thing that can top this summer… is next summer!

-r0gue

p.s.  I know a Captain America movie already exists… It doesn’t exist in my universe.