I just caught Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 last night on Disney Plus. It's my third MCU movie this year, after Black Panther: Wakanda Forever and Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, but not including Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (and as a quick aside, why does every sequel have to have a sub-title these days? What's wrong with 2, or even II?). I've seen all of the MCU films at least once, and have kept up with them pretty assiduously since the pandemic and the simultaneous releases on streaming. I've also kept up pretty closely with all the tie-in TV shows, from WandaVision on down to Secret Invasion.
I can't help feeling, though, that maybe the world needs a bit of a break from all of this. The irony is that Guardians 3 was probably my favorite of that specific sub-series, and certainly the best MCU movie in a while, at least since Spider-Man: No Way Home.
The thing is that the MCU has been drifting a bit since Endgame. There's been a lot of retrenching from the events of that movie, particularly Thor and Spider-Man. There's also been some recovery from real-world events, like Chadwick Boseman's untimely death, which threw a spanner in the works for the Black Panther sequel. Some of the TV shows and movies have also hinted at the next Big Bad to come, which is meant to be Kang.
However, very little of this has been as exciting as the first three phases. First of all, it's hard to muster much enthusiasm for Kang after Thanos. There's a bit of a cliche about the way all Marvel villains are sympathetic in the same way, and if you pick apart Thanos's motives then they don't really hold up, but it's hard to argue that a guy who's so powerful and cruel that he just wipes out half the universe with a snap of his fingers is boring.
Not so for Kang. His motivations haven't really come through, beyond the fact that he wants to rule the multiverse/timeline/whatever. There are some Kangs who are good, and most who are bad, and at least one Kang that we've seen is a later version of the one that the Avengers are set to fight in Secret Wars, which is scheduled for 2027.
The other problem's the characters they've hung these movies around. Only two of the seven movies in Phase 4 have been around real deep cuts/previously unseen characters: Shang-Chi and the Eternals. Black Widow felt like an afterthought given her death in Endgame, though, and Thor: Love and Thunder missed out on a lot of what made Ragnarok charming, while also burning another actress (Natalie Portman) and character (Jane) that the series didn't really do right by. As for Black Panther, because I had a particularly bad run-in with anti-vax ideology during the pandemic, I can't separate Shuri from Leticia Wright, so I was pretty uncomfortable with that.
I also thought Dr Strange in the Multiverse of Madness gave us none of the crazy psychedelia promised by the first Dr Strange movie, and also walked back some of the character work that the Scarlet Witch went through in WandaVision (as far as I could tell; it all came through a bit garbled). Eternals was just kinda boring. I liked Shang-Chi, but appearances by Wong and the Abomination aside, it didn't do much to show that it was part of the shared universe.
The worst of the lot, though, wasn't a movie at all. It was Secret Invasion, which was billed as Nick Fury's triumphant return but, like so many of the post-Endgame movies, showed that the creators had no idea what to do with the characters or plot lines. It could have been the spiritual successor to Captain America: The Winter Soldier, but it just ended up killing off Cobie Smulders and Ben Mendelsohn's characters, who'd otherwise been classing the joint up. I hope to see more of Olivia Colman, but will the creators know what to do with her?
So what did I like about Guardians 3? It felt like the first movie in a while that made us care about the characters and their relationships to one another. By making it all about Rocket's origin and his link to the villain, the High Evolutionary, it gave us some nice glimpses into his motivation for sticking with the Guardians. It also got to give all of the characters scenes with each other, showing how they've changed over the course of the MCU. Most importantly, it made for a nice stopping point, as we said goodbye to a couple of actors (Dave Bautista and Zoe Saldaña) and characters (Peter Quill, though he'll probably be back). It ends (spoilers) with a new team, but it also feels like a fitting goodbye, which rang true for me, even though the Guardians movies were never my favorites.
I know that Disney has announced it will be scaling back new Marvel and Star Wars movies and shows for the time being, but part of me wishes they'd just stopped altogether for a couple of years (on the Marvel stuff; Star Wars can be another discussion when I've watched Ahsoka). Leaving the pandemic aside, they could have taken some time to figure out what the next big arc should be, who should be involved, and most crucially, how to involve the X-Men and Spider-Man characters in future. BTW I still think it would have been neat if Endgame could have worked the X-Men into the MCU, via multiversal shenanigans.
Maybe we'd have missed out on genuinely good shows like WandaVision, Loki and Hawkeye, but maybe that would have been worth it if the films themselves had been executed better. Instead of burning off good actors and beloved characters, we could have gotten the version of Secret Invasion that lived up to the hype while also giving us a proper send-off for Samuel L Jackson and Nick Fury.
It might all be academic. The WGA/SAG-Aftra strike is ongoing, so there's little work being done anyway, and very few of the coming movies seem that interesting, though I'm intrigued to see what The Marvels will be like. But overall, it all feels very far from the sense of fun that I got from Iron Man, way back in 2008, and that post-credits scene where Nick Fury shows up to tease the Avengers project. The difference is that there weren't the same expectations back then, whereas now everything Marvel has to be the biggest event.
I just don't think they're going to maintain that momentum.
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