Tag Archives: Thor

The Marvel Cinematic Universe: My rankings from best to worst

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My previous post described my recent viewing of all 23 movies in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) and examined differences between my rankings of the movies and the rankings of critics, journalists and viewers. This post gives brief reviews of the MCU movies explaining why my rankings are sometimes quite different to others, and presents these in order from best to worst. Every other ranking I examined presents them in the opposite order from worst to best. However, I didn’t want to make readers plough through reviews of the worst movies first. Apart from the fact that nobody may be interested to read all my reviews, I’ve done them mainly to explore what I love and don’t love about the MCU, I’ve also included an index below, so you can jump straight to any particular review that interests you.

Warning: there are spoilers ahead.  If you haven’t seen these movies, watch them in timeline order first. In each review, I also give the median ranking from the 23 rankings I analysed in my previous post. The range in brackets gives the 25th and 75tb percentiles of the ranks.

1.  Black Panther

2.  Doctor Strange

3.  Thor

4.  Avengers: Endgame

5.  The Avengers

6.  Captain Marvel

7.  Avengers: Infinity War

8.  Avengers: Age of Ultron

9.  Captain America: Civil War

10.  Ant-Man and the Wasp

11.  Ant-Man

12.  Thor: Ragnarok

13.  Iron Man

14.  Thor: the dark world

15.  Guardians of the Galaxy 2

16.  Guardians of the Galaxy

17.  Captain America:
The Winter Soldier

18.  Captain America:
The First Avenger

19.  Spider-man: Homecoming

20.  Spider-man:
Far from Home

21.  Iron Man 3

22.  The Incredible Hulk

23.  Iron Man 2

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Watching all 23 Marvel Cinematic Universe movies in timeline order

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My sons have been fans of the Marvel superhero movies for most of their lives and insisted I watch Marvel’s latest offering, WandaVision, a nine part TV series released weekly on Disney+ from January15th to March 5th this year.  When we got past the first two episodes, I was hooked. But the boys needed to explain quite a few of the characters and Easter Eggs to me and I realized my knowledge of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) was quite inadequate.

In just over eleven years since Iron Man was released in 2008, Marvel has released 23 movies that are all part of the same universe, the MCU. I saw quite a few of these in cinemas when first released or later on TV, but not all of them. So I decided to watch all 23 in timeline order, the order in which their events occurred in the MCU. WandaVision and the currently running Disney+ series The Falcon and the Winter Soldier are also part of the MCU, as is Black Widow due to be released in May. but I restricted my timeline viewing to the 23 movies in the following Table that were released before this year.

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Our Asgardian ancestors

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I grew up reading northern European myths and legends, including tales of Odin, Thor, and the other gods of Asgard. I was largely unaware of the Marvel comics appropriation of Thor and other Asgardians as superheros until the Marvel cinematic universe started to hit the big screens in the last 12 years.

Loki, Thor and Odin (from the Marvel Cinematic Universe)

I have only recently come across the growing evidence that an Asgardian was one of our ancestors, way back near the beginning of the evolution of life, when the first eukaryotic cell appeared. Eukaryotes are organisms whose cells contain membrane-wrapped internal structures, such as a nucleus, unlike prokaryotes (Bacteria and Archaea), which have no membrane-bound internal structures.

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Avengers: Endgame

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I took my younger son to see Avengers: Endgame on the big IMAX 3D screen the day after it was released. The theatre was almost full, unusual for Geneva. My older son went later in the evening, and he and his friends got the last remaining seats in row A, only two or three metres from the screen.  He claims he enjoyed it and didn’t really notice he was almost in the action.

The movie is long at three hours, but we didn’t notice the passing of time. Lots of emotional scenes, if anything a bit overdone for my taste. But still satisfying, and overall, the movie certainly wraps up the entire arc of the Avengers cycle of movies in a deeply satisfying way. There are lots of good reviews out there and I won’t try to cover the same ground. Rotten Tomatoes has quite a few critics reviews and the Tomatometer has a score of 95% and audience score of 91%. IMDB has a rating of 9 out of 10.

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