"Captain America: The First Avenger"


I know, these are the two movies I said I never needed to 
do. And I'm really not going to. I just want to note a few 
things and briefly summarize anything that proved important 
later.

Stanley Tucci's character, Dr. Erskine, was the entire 
reason Steve became Captain America. He chose a skinny, 
asthmatic kid to set up for the super soldier experiment 
because he had the right moral compass (IE not joining up 
to kill Nazis but to stop "bullies") because the serum 
amplifies personality as well as physical strength. He was 
proven right when he tested the whole regiment by throwing 
a fake grenade and Steve and Peggy were the only ones to 
run TOWARD it.

This is a speech Erskine gives, and remember this movie 
came out in 2011. "So many people forget that the first 
country the Nazis invaded was their own. You know, after 
the last war my people struggled. They felt weak. They felt 
small. And then Hitler comes along with the marching and 
the big show and the flags. And he hears of me - my work - 
and he finds me. And he says 'you...you will make us 
strong.'" Presumably if this had been made a few years 
later, the words "make Germany great again" would have been 
used somewhere in there. This is a reminder that while 
history might not exactly repeat itself, it often rhymes. 
By the way, this is followed by an explanation that Schmidt 
(played by Hugo Weaving with a lot of scenery chewing 
gusto), took the fantasies Hitler spun to inspire the 
people literally and he went on a crazed mission to 
discover the power left on earth by the gods. Specifically 
the Norse ones because he finds the Teseract in a carving 
of Ygaddrisil. He injected himself with an early version of 
the serum, which is one of the main ways supervillains are 
created in comics universes. And since he takes off his 
human mask to reveal the Red Skull look about halfway 
through the movie, it's apparent how Hugo was even easier 
to replace after one movie than Terrance Howard. Especially 
since it was never really clear what the Tesseract did to 
him in the end.

Watching the first act now, years later, I am reminded that 
these movies really do the CGI better when they are making 
the target a giant and not awkwardly trying to make Chris 
Evans comically smaller.

Erskine was killed by a Hydranazi in an effort to steal 
serum and I'm not totally sure how changing where Peggy was 
in the room made that happen earlier in the "What If" 
episode. 

The Tesseract fell out of the plane long before Steve 
crashed it in the arctic and was found somewhere in the 
ocean by Howard Stark in a failed effort to find the 
wreckage. Steve is actually found in the present day, of 
course, where all efforts to gently assimilate him to the 
new time fail immediately, he is introduced to Fury and the 
only end credit scene is just a partial scene from "The 
Avengers", followed by a preview.



"Iron Man 2"


Ugh. Now, the main reason I insisted on never doing this 
movie is because it begins with a variation on Atlas 
Shrugged with Tony being questioned by Senator Gary 
Shandling on whether his tech is dangerous or not and Tony 
arguing that they're better off having the dangerous weapon 
on their side than in enemy hands. Which is what led to the 
Mutant Registry/Civil War thing. And the rest is about 30 
minutes of plot stretched into two hours. But now that What 
If is trying to remind me of the bad guy I had totally 
forgotten about...

Justin Hammer is something like Tony's main competitor and 
the guy arguing against him in the hearing. Unfortunately, 
he takes a back seat for like, half the movie, to the 
Russian guy whose dad worked with Tony's dad until Howard 
deported him because he was a greedy dick. When Tony 
announces he is Iron Man, the guy uses the blueprints to 
make himself an arc reactor. Eventually, Hammer partners 
with him to basically use him as an attack dog who is 
really good at tech. He also gets in with the military - 
via Rhodey in his first appearance with his new face - to 
supply them with weapons, including a smart bomb the size 
of a thick marker that can "reduce the population of an 
entire building to zero" which is not at all terrifying 
(luckily it doesn't work). Unsurprisingly, the 
demonstration of the future of the military goes sideways 
and a lot of people are caught in the crossfire between 
Tony and Hammer's hacked drones, one of which is War 
Machine with Rhodey in it.

The B plot is the fact that the arc reactor that is keeping 
Tony alive is also slowly killing him with paladium 
poisoning. The first person to figure this out is, of 
course, Rhodey. There is something of a comics accurate 
Civil War plotline in that at one point Tony gets drunk and 
they have a very destructive fight in front of lots of 
witnesses. The other B plot is the introduction of Nat, who 
starts out undercover as a sort of second Pepper who is 
"with Legal". After the aforementioned fight, she and Fury 
confront Tony at a diner and give him a treatment for the 
poisoning while he searches for the cure (or...a different 
element that can power the arc reactor anyway). Which he is 
incentivized to do by Fury putting him on house arrest with 
Coulson keeping guard (until he is pulled away on the whole 
Thor thing which is in the post credit scene). He finds a 
video message from dad with this message for him: "I built 
this for you [...] I'm limited by the technology of my 
time, but one day you'll figure this out. And when you do, 
you will change the world. What is and will always be my 
greatest creation, is you."

And if it wasn't clear in the last one, Fury makes it clear 
here: Howard Stark was one of the founding members of 
SHIELD.

Because I only saw this once and pretty much forgot about 
it, I forgot that the best part of it was Nat casually 
dispatching a whole string of bad guys on her way to taking 
care of the Russian guy while Happy (who insisted on 
helping her) struggles to subdue one guy. Pepper has Hammer 
arrested and he promises to get revenge, so...did that not 
go anywhere? And after Tony has to fly her away from an 
exploding drone, she screams that she can't handle this 
whole thing and the stress of not knowing "if you're gonna 
kill yourself or wreck the whole company." And then they 
kiss and all is forgiven again, of course. And Senator 
Shandling reluctantly pins a medal to Tony, being sure to 
stab him in the process and note how "annoying a little 
prick can be." I'm pretty sure Chrissy would have some sort 
of in-character comeback to that one if she were here. 
Speaking of which, this is what happened when I told her I 
was doing this:
   Chrissy: Hang on...you did what now?
   Diandra: I know I said I refused to do "Iron Man 2" 
    under any circumstances, but...
   Chrissy: No, you did it WITHOUT me?
   Diandra: It's really just a couple paragraphs of 
    summary. I mostly ran through them on fast forward, 
    looking for anything that might be relevant to the 
    second season of "What If", which is the only reason I 
    needed to do it at all.
   Chrissy: ................
   Diandra: Are you mad at me?
   Chrissy: No, but I WILL be thinking of ways you can make 
    it up to me.