KK Analyzes MCU Villains - Phase 1 and 2

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KK Analyzes MCU Villains - Phase 1 and 2

Postby KleinerKiller » Wed Apr 24, 2019 9:58 am

Around a solid year ago, I pitched a new column called where I'd go in-depth about villains from across all forms of media, since I'm so passionate about those kinds of characters and have so much to say. The general gist is that each article would be multiple entries (with some particularly rich tapestries getting full profiles to themselves) each going way too in-depth about a particular antagonist from a particular series, praising the good ones and offering my own two cents about how the bad ones could have been fixed. Despite completing several articles and submitting this one back in September, due to various real-life reasons, it never ended up getting put up. And with Avengers: Endgame just upon us, I just don't feel like waiting anymore. Here it is. Enjoy.

I've done a little bit of proofreading and minor revision and I've spoilered each entry simply for length, but otherwise, this is exactly as I submitted it back in September. I don't have Phase 3 written, as I'm waiting to see Endgame to fill out Thanos's entry, and I might even wait until after Spider-Man: Far From Home since Kevin Feige insists that's the true end of Phase 3; additionally, a lot of my general writing has been on the backburner while I try to get my life in order, so any further "articles" will be a while as I make time for revisions and stuff. Still, all feedback and/or general discussion is appreciated.

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This column will contain full relevant spoilers for all discussed works. Also, since Marvel basically no longer considers The Incredible Hulk an MCU film except for the character of General Ross, I’m happy to ignore it in all future discussion too.

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Obadiah Stane – (Iron Man)


”Tony Stark was able to build this in a cave! WITH A BOX OF SCRAPS!”

Spoiler: show
It’s sort of surreal, thinking back to Obadiah Stane. We’re nearing the end of over a decade of storytelling, fresh off the heels of a universal crisis brought about by a truly fascinating villain whom I can’t wait to profile when the phase is over. We’ve seen baddies ranging from the incomprehensibly vast to the horribly personal menace the heroes we’ve come to love. And where’d it all start? With a guy who got greedy and decided to push his business partner off the table to tack a few extra zeroes onto his bottom line.

I’ll be criticizing a lot of villains for lack of depth, so let’s establish this up front: Stane has the depth of a small sheaf of papers and the nuance of the average internet comment. He is not a rich tapestry of a character, and there are no deeper layers to explore that make him so… mostly. Stane is a gleeful war profiteer, and he doesn’t want his buddy jeopardizing his schemes. He’s unique in that regard, though, because unlike every other MCU corporate villain up to the time of this writing, his schemes are already complete: Stark Industries weapons are being funneled to both sides of global conflicts, and the company’s reaping the benefits undeterred. The actions he takes in the film, from orchestrating Tony’s assassination attempt to exterminating the terrorists he was working with, are mostly to cover up what he’s done and ensure that it doesn’t get traced back to him. Tony fights not to stop the double-dealing from happening at all, but to cut the rot out of his company once he’s had his eyes opened to its spread, and that sets up a pretty interesting conflict that utilizes what could have been a forgettable villain well.

To use that oh-so-tired parlance, Stane acts as a dark mirror of Tony, in a way that goes far beyond their suits of armor and is far more successful than many similar villains in the MCU. With their laid-back charm and cynical worldviews, the two are very similar people from the outside, until Tony realizes what he’s allowed to happen and Stane is revealed to be behind it all. What truly differentiates them, yet also makes them work perfectly in parallel, is that Stane represents the temptation to sway to the other side. Cap, Thor, and the like are never in a position to reckon with their ethical alignments the way Tony does fighting his own company; they may find out dirt about those they trust (Cap especially in Winter Soldier), but in Tony's situation, it would be as easy as turning a blind eye and reaping the continued benefits of the status quo. He has to make the firm decision to rebel against the enterprise he’s unknowingly let be constructed, making his origin story still feel like some of the most genuine character growth in the early parts of the franchise.

This growth climaxes with a second, more direct attempt on Tony’s life (via Stane’s signature weapon, a small sonic device that paralyzes the nervous system, which is still one of the neater gimmicks for a human villain), and when that fails and he’s finally backed into a corner, he dons the massive copycat suit he’s been assembling and goes on a rampage. This is a bit of a mixed bag; while the final battle is compelling and it’s in character for Stane to resist arrest however possible, the reveal of the suit comes so late in the film that it feels less momentous, and its sluggishness makes it clearly inferior to the Iron Man suit from the outset. Not to mention that, despite their capabilities being quite different, it would set off the unevenly entertaining trend of heroes fighting their evenly matched doppelgangers. Still, it's a fun action movie climax to a fun action movie, and seeing Stane finally get fried by the reactor Tony built for peace is a fine sendoff.

Of course, none of this would hold together as well as it does if not for Jeff Bridges’ glorious performance. Despite his character’s clear sinister intent, Bridges is so naturally charming and lovable that it’s easy to let yourself believe he’s just Tony’s slightly sleazy friend and mentor. Even when his evil is on full display and he starts gobbling up the scenery, he’s entertaining as hell, sliming it up and inserting himself into everyone’s personal space in a way that’s simple, but super menacing. He and RDJ have a great onscreen rapport that completely sells their decades of history and strained friendship, and when the reveal comes and he goes full bastard, their mutual charm carries over all through the final battle. In the hands of a less capable actor, or one less game to go all-out when the time called for it, he’d likely be a footnote I’d have a hard time writing anything about; with Bridges giving him life, he soars.

Stane isn’t an all-time great villain; he’s rooted primarily by his casting and the role he plays in the broader story, and his climactic play is, again, pretty nonsensical. But as the B-tier antagonist heralding the start of the entire MCU, he’s got a lot going for him that works perfectly in context, and that shouldn’t be forgotten just because Marvel kept going back to his template.


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Ivan Vanko – (Iron Man 2)


”If you can make God bleed, people will cease to believe in him, and there will be blood in the water and the sharks will come. All I have to do is sit here and watch the world consume you.”

Spoiler: show
Now we’re going places.

Iron Man 2 is still one of the most mediocre of Marvel’s repertoire, an utterly passionless and pointless waste of numerous interesting concepts made simply to bridge the Avengers gap and fill some time. And its principal villain, a haphazard combination of semi-famous comic nemeses Whiplash and Crimson Dynamo, is the bizarre cherry atop the melted, half-dried sundae. Everything about him is just so weird and abrupt. Mickey Rourke putting on a subpar Russian accent, the absurd costume he builds throughout the intro and then drops after one scene, the laser whips he barely uses, it’s just so odd.

And yet… I must admit, there is something about him that works for me. Maybe it’s all down to Rourke and his utter scenery-devouring commitment to the role, or maybe it’s just how few of Marvel’s movie villains are written as being out-and-out shithouse crazy like this guy. No matter what happens in the meandering shreds of plot, you get the distinct impression that he couldn’t care less. He reacts to every setback with a knowing cackle, and spends most of his screen time drily playing Justin Hammer like a fiddle. The casualness, of course, extends to his brutality; while he doesn’t get to commit much, his brazen assault on the racetrack and darkly comical offscreen murder of his guards are memorable beats that outshine the movie around them.

Why, then, has he gone so forgotten? Why, if I like a lot about him, do I barely ever recall him and groan when I see pictures of him? To my mind, it’s partly because he’s barely an entity despite being the de facto Big Bad and final opponent. After a decent introduction and the awesome racetrack setpiece, he’s immediately locked up and doesn’t get out or have much significant impact until the climactic Stark Expo blowout. Vanko’s impact on Tony’s arc is minimal, since his terminal illness is more than enough of an inciting incident to get Tony paranoid and bitter. And when he shows up again at the end, the whole encounter is played off for a casual joke at Hammer’s expense and a brief callback to solidify Tony and Rhodey’s bromance, before he’s wasted in an unbelievably short and ham-handed fight.

Whenever you make your villain a “force of chaos” type while also keeping them in the background and keeping the interactions between hero and villain few and far between, you run a tightrope that requires some skillful balance to cross. IM2 faceplants off the tightrope one step in. The force of chaos archetype tends to work best for a very focused and personal conflict with someone dead set on constantly screwing with the protagonist (the Joker is a good example, especially Heath Ledger’s), since impersonal chaos is easily reduced to white noise. Background villains, meanwhile, really benefit from being careful planners and tacticians and having their story focus heavily on the effects of those plans. Vanko tries to dip into both, but his crazy scheme doesn’t hit the core of either and is left floating in the wind.

There’s also the problem of his motivation and how it ties into his character. Marvel would become better about at least consistently tying the history and goals of the villain into his or her personality, but Vanko is a bit of a confusing case. His lust for revenge over Howard Stark screwing over his father and condemning the family to a life of poverty isn’t a terrible idea on paper, but it’s vague and boring in presentation and he’s far too comedically psychotic to be at all pitiable. So he instead comes off as simply an envious manchild, which then makes his entire plot little else but shallow pettiness – which, if it was the point, isn’t a great character trait for a fleshed-out baddie we’re supposed to see as a marginal threat.

And if it was intended, why even bother with the Freudian Excuse charade? Tony never sits down for an extended period and chats with him about his resentment- they only speak once outside of battle, and no words are exchanged in their two “fights”. Such a personal motive is background noise that doesn’t inform his actions or interactions. He could just have easily been a psycho Mark Chapman type who hates Tony because his dog told him “Stark” means “Satan”, and his dynamic with Tony would have been fundamentally unchanged. It should go without saying that a character’s motivations must inform his or her actions. If you can extract the past and heart from your villain and have the conflict of the movie remain unaltered, you’ve fucked up.

Despite all of this, Vanko is a pretty easy villain to fix. The pieces are almost all in place: you have Mickey Rourke sucking the entire set down his gullet, a decent backstory, some scenes that are killer in a vacuum, and ample time for he and Tony to interact between the first and third acts. The solution isn’t that radical of a change. Instead of having Hammer nab him immediately, just have him share three or four extended scenes with Tony from behind bars, chatting about their fathers and letting Rourke do his best Lecter impression. This allows the two of them to actually build up a relationship that feeds into and informs Tony’s otherwise isolated journey through the film, and gives their eventual showdown actual depth and purpose beyond ticking off a “hero vs villain” check box. Yeah, you might have to cut out the parakeet argument or Nick Fury solving the plot over donuts, but the scars from that terrible sacrifice will heal.

(Also, since I don’t have much to say about Hammer himself, at least not to fill up a paragraph: he’s a great comic relief villain and Sam Rockwell plays his weaselly mannerisms off perfectly. I wish he were in more of the movies.)


(The image link I originally had for Red Skull no longer works, and I'm too tired / Endgame-spoiler-wary to hunt for another fitting one. If you're reading this, you know what Red Skull looks like.)


Johann “Red Skull” Schmidt – (Captain America: The First Avenger, Avengers: Infinity War)


”You could have the power of the GODS! Yet you wear a flag on your chest and think you fight a battle of nations! I have seen the future, Captain – there are no flags!”

Spoiler: show
Disfigured HYDRA founder Johann Schmidt, in my eyes, is where the pattern starts; where the MCU started getting its “villain problem”. Most people either like or tolerate Stane, Vanko is merely at the level of the rest of his dire film (in addition to he and Hammer being mostly played less seriously than other threats), and Loki’s first appearance in Thor was quite well received. The First Avenger is a solid movie elevated by its period gimmick and lead performance, but Hugo Weaving’s turn as Cap’s iconic arch-nemesis was the first time I can remember everyone shrugging their shoulders and going, “meh”.

In fairness to the character, there was never going to be that much depth to him. Red Skull is, whatever Disney’s toy-line-defending insistence to the contrary, a Nazi among Nazis even if he’s nothing like his enthusiastically open comic counterpart. He doesn’t wear the armband, he doesn’t heil der Fuhrer, he doesn’t goose-step through concentration camps with his boot on Jewish necks; it even turns out that he’s having HYDRA play both sides and plans to destroy both the Allies and the Axis with his fancy superweapon. But his heart burns with the same hate, the same petty sadism toward those he perceives as lower life, and Weaving’s moustache-twirling performance leans into that at every turn.

Yet that’s a big reason why he ultimately doesn’t quite work, beyond the copious entertainment value of watching one of the most talented bad guy actors of our time sneer and chew his way through a role he ultimately hated too much to revisit. It’s not impossible to write a full-bore Nazi and have him be a compelling villain; they’re pretty much history’s greatest monsters, after all, give or take a Stalin. Lean into that monstrousness and give it the backing of historical context, and there’s not much more you need to do other than turn in a good performance. Everyone in their right minds (*cough cough, nervously tugs collar*) knows how bad the Nazis were, so the audience would need little further context; you wouldn’t even need to show anything that would push the film past PG-13. Cap got his start in the comics punching Hitler, so it’d be a nicely heroic start for him in the MCU too.

But it’s also possible to go the other route, and have him actively hate his own side as he does in the movie. Certainly, there were a great deal of German soldiers and officers who secretly detested the Nazi Party, and the idea of an antagonist playing both sides for his own gain is actually quite promising (Inglourious Basterds’ Hans Landa is played ambiguously enough that it’s hard to tell whether he’s a believer in the cause and just sells his side out to save his own skin, or if he actually doesn’t care about the ideology except as an excuse to kill, but I’ll probably get to him another day). If the “playing both sides” angle were more than window dressing and he were motivated at least in part by disgust over what his country has become, or by resentment towards humanity in general for being so weak as to get embroiled in a worldwide war, he could be fairly compelling. It wouldn’t quite make things morally complex – he’d still be an evil, Nazi-adjacent asshat trying to destroy the major world powers and slaughter hundreds of millions – but it would be something interesting enough to flesh out the conflict.

Red Skull, unfortunately, is in the awkward half-and-half position. He can’t go all-out displaying true Holocaust-level evil, because it’s hard to sell Nazi toys to kids, but there’s also no room for the psychological complexity that makes a manipulative turncoat work – and besides, the film still wants him to echo Nazism even if he can’t be shown being one. You can’t portray a half-Nazi, and that’s ultimately what Red Skull is depicted as. His cruelty is aimless and without any real conviction. He stands for nothing. He’s just an evil hypocrite who wants to rule the world for reasons. There’s no grounding to him in any direction, which lessens the impact of Cap’s struggle against him. He’s not even a great soulless supervillain in the classic sense, despite much of the film meaning to hearken back to the comics of the 40s.

I still don’t quite hate him, and that’s down to a few things. Weaving plays everything to the hilt, both before and after he reveals his true disfigured face, and the sheer conviction with which he delivers every sneering barb and Saturday morning cartoon monologue goes a long way toward making such an empty character work. The costuming and makeup used to bring such an outlandish character to life are pretty cool to observe, especially since anything less would look so ridiculous that it would shatter the movie. He’s got some good one-liners, especially his casual, dismissive delivery of “hail HYDRA”, and offering his car keys to let his subordinate get away is a hilarious character beat. None of this, sadly, makes up for him being so bland, but he’s on a slightly higher tier than the absolute worst MCU villains.

I’ve already offered up my ideas to fix him – either make him a full Nazi who wants to use the Tesseract to “cleanse” the world, or flesh out the playing both sides angle – and I did so up there because of unforeseen circumstances while I was writing the first version of this entry.

I am of course talking about the fact that against all odds, to the shock of everyone, Red Skull reappears in Avengers: Infinity War after almost a decade of silence – and his brief role there, having been turned into the cursed and undying guardian of the Soul Stone after being absorbed by the Tesseract in First Avenger, is actually a course correction for his character that I like a lot. His empty soullessness is exactly what traps him for eternity, since he cares about nothing and thus can’t gain the Stone or leave, and Ross Marquand echoes a much older, more contemplative version of Weaving’s performance so well that I momentarily thought they’d gotten him back. It’s a small thing, but it proves how far Marvel has come since First Avenger, and I just wanted to acknowledge that in the end, they did sort of fix him.


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Loki – (Thor, The Avengers, and so on)


”It hurts, doesn’t it? Being lied to. Being told you’re one thing and then learning it’s all a fiction.”

Spoiler: show
It’s a miracle that Loki turned out as well as he did. The MCU was in its infancy when Thor introduced him, having popped out one hit and two disastrous misses beforehand. Stane was enjoyable, but not exactly a masterwork, while the villains of Incredible Hulk and Iron Man 2 wallowed in mediocrity. And suddenly everyone was talking about Loki, the envious trickster god who would go on to unite the Avengers and become one of the biggest recurring players in the MCU.

For the one who’s arguably the main villain of the franchise until Thanos turns up, the key to Loki’s character is that he’s fundamentally pathetic. It doesn’t matter what kind of plan he pulls or how much power he robes himself in; he starts Thor as a sad little boy in a man’s body, desperate for the approval and affection he unwittingly deprives himself of, and that’s what he remains all the way to the end. He has formidable powers and definitely knows how to stay on top, but whenever he’s beaten – whether by the hands of his brother, a very annoyed Bruce Banner, or his very annoyed boss – he’s always crushed and humiliated. Yet that’s key to what makes him so compelling to watch: he’s powerful, but no matter how high he rises, he’s never all-powerful. He’s the first villain in the entire MCU with vulnerability, and it gives him a dimension so many others lack.

Loki’s scheme to claim the throne of Asgard for himself in Thor is treated as a brilliant power play, but it’s really just him acting on impulse in a situation that’s steadily bubbling out of his control. He means to get Thor cast down so he can snatch the throne he feels entitled to, but as soon as he learns of his true parentage while trying to move against Odin, he backslides hard in impotent rage – and once his brother returns to stop him, he completely fails to compensate and ends up throwing himself into the void when his father once again denies him. It’s not that sad to watch, as Loki spends most of Thor’s runtime being a petty dick and we aren’t well acquainted with him yet, but it gains some perhaps undeserved power with the benefit of hindsight.

If his first supposed death had stuck, he’d just be a potentially interesting curiosity on this list, likely forgotten after a while. But it didn’t, and it’s only when he’s able to go full supervillain in The Avengers that he truly makes waves. Stripped of all connection to his old life and given an army by an unseen Thanos, he’s let loose in New York and boy, does he paint the town red. Loki is a delightful menace, using his staff, brainwashing powers, and general trickery to make himself appear like the all-powerful god he wants so badly to be. He projects unbelievable smarminess and arrogance, always coming off like his victory is already assured, and while this is FAR from a unique trait for villains in or out of the MCU, Tom Hiddleston’s effortless energy and the setup from Thor make it much more interesting to watch. All of his scenes in Avengers are just wonderful, whether he’s monologuing at the top of his game or getting the smug beat out of him in every fight.

But ultimately, he’s just playing with Thanos’s toys and he can’t surpass his own limitations. His biggest lasting accomplishment is pulling a fast one on SHIELD and stabbing Agent Coulson in the back, and even that’s punctuated by one of many humiliating blows he suffers whenever he starts to get confident. He barely manages to open the portal that lets his Chitauri invade, but mere minutes later all of his ambitions are put in the ground by one of Hawkeye’s exploding arrows and – in a moment that will live on in cinematic history forever – a quick and hilarious thrashing from the Hulk. His reign of terror ends with him wheezing on the ground, body and dreams broken, still as pathetic as ever. It’s a great image to end his time in the film on, and a reminder that takes on saddening gravity later: Loki cannot punch above his weight class, or it will end in swift and painful disaster.

Over the course of Thor: The Dark World and Ragnarok, Loki subsequently goes through a sort-of redemption: grieving his mother’s death at Malekith’s hands, learning to appreciate his brother and be slightly less loathing of his place in the universe once he’s been cast so low, and so on. Actually, it’d be more accurate to say that he goes through two sort-of redemptions: Dark World was intended to be his permanent sendoff, with him apparently dying in the climax and bidding Thor a tearful farewell, but negative test audience reactions led the studio to shoot a post-credits scene teasing his next scheme and resetting him to his trickster status quo. All the better that he live and participate in Ragnarok, where his arc flows much more naturally in the hands of Taika Waititi than in Alan Taylor’s (as is the case for everything else), and the tense but heartwarming camaraderie the adoptive siblings develop is an earned culmination to years of antagonism.

And that’s why I sincerely hope that Loki’s death in Infinity War will last. He’s a major character, one of the most popular in the entire MCU, and yet his end is sudden, painful, and inevitable. He steps up to defend Thor from a furious Thanos minutes after the end of Ragnarok gave them hope together, but despite how much our culture loves its dramatic heroic sacrifices, Loki is afforded no dignity. His final attack is impotent in the face of an unfathomably greater power and Thanos simply chokes the life out of him, leaving his face puffy and bruised, eyes forever open, mouth silently screaming. In death, the god who let himself fall and barely regained a semblance of nobility is reduced again to a pitiful wretch.

Loki was a highlight of the first three phases, lighting up the screen across five movies, even though two were pretty bland and he only lived for minutes in the fifth. He worked as a scoundrel resenting his place, as a credible threat to unite the Avengers, and as a faintly lovable fiend who had come so far by the end that his end – predictable as it was from a meta perspective – was still a genuine shock. Hiddleston was always game, embodying all aspects of the character even before Chris Hemsworth had nailed down his best Thor, and while I’ll miss his performance dearly, his time should be over. Any further appearances outside of dreams or spirits or whatever would diminish the work he’s already done.


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Aldrich Killian – (Iron Man 3)


”How can I be pissed at you, Tony? I’m here to thank you. You gave me the greatest gift that anyone has ever given me. Desperation.”

Spoiler: show
And now for the guy who blew up the internet for a few solid months. Hoo boy.

Fortunate coincidence thanks to my long-term writer’s block on this article allowed me to catch Iron Man 3 on TV just before writing this entry, as I’d missed it in theaters and only previously seen it in scattered chunks elsewhere. If nothing else, I came away with a much better opinion of the film as a whole; it’s distinctly Shane Black, does a lot of cool things with Tony outside of his suit, and feels like a proper climax for his solo films (especially the magnificent suit storm finale, which I seem to be unpopular in liking a lot). But I’m not here to review Iron Man 3 so many years late, I’m here to talk about the villain. And boy, what a villain to talk about.

Aldrich Killian is yet another businessman with a vendetta propping things up behind the scenes, and the man’s not exactly Obadiah Stane when it comes to screen presence (or Hammer for sheer, pathetic hilarity). And this visionary with a greedy dream just so happens to be propping up the film incarnation of The Mandarin, Iron Man’s most well-known nemesis in the comics, via the help of cracked-out actor Trevor Slattery. This reveal is singularly responsible for Iron Man 3 being possibly the most polarizing MCU film to date, and in order to go into why Killian doesn’t quite work as well as he should, I have to address that twist first.

Note: the “All Hail the King” short reveals that neither Slattery nor Killian are the real Mandarin, and Killian merely stole the name from the true leader of the Ten Rings group that kidnapped Tony in the first film. I’ll be ignoring this, because it will almost certainly never lead to anything and feels like a salve to appease fans more than anything else, even though it was pre-planned to explain the plot holes Killian being the leader of the Ten Rings would cause.

To be perfectly honest… I don’t mind it. The fake Mandarin is very creepy and Ben Kingsley knocks it out of the park, but because he’s literally a hodgepodge caricature of assorted things Americans fear about terrorists, there’s not much to him beyond the abstract; Kingsley is equally good as Slattery, a great source of unexpected comic relief and a little bit of meta commentary, and I wouldn’t want to trade in either performance. Plus, the twist itself is a well-executed scene that goes on to inform the aspects of the plot that work, and it’s a forgivable way of modernizing the character. I understand the disappointment and frustration – I used to feel the same way – but I fall on the side of the proponents.

Unfortunately, Killian isn’t as well done as the twist about him. Only one thing truly works about him: his plan, which I actually really like. He’s quietly playing the long game in such a way that he’ll essentially run global conflict in secret as everyone looks on obliviously; he wants to rule from the shadows, not in the open (like HYDRA in Winter Soldier, but all at the behest of one driven man). By setting up a figurehead as the most prominent and elusive terrorist in the world, he has a perfect excuse to kill the president, while developing the Extremis serum both gives him immense power and wealth and allows him to blackmail the soon-to-be-promoted vice president into his pocket with the promise of healing his amputee daughter (the Mandarin also gives him the perfect cover for the frequent explosions caused by Extremis failures, ensuring his story has no holes). It’s like a much more layered and ambitious version of Stane’s double-dealing scheme, and one of the more intelligent variations on the “take over the world” goal in the MCU.

It’s a tragedy that the character behind this cool plan is not that good. Guy Pearce is a good actor who gets some decent material, but Killian is a cookie-cutter smug asshole who projects very little in the way of charm or menace, and Pearce only barely rises above that when he’s the supposed secondary antagonist; called upon to be the Big Bad, he flounders. Worse still are his motives: the Mandarin plot and his ravaging of Tony’s world are all because… Tony was a dick to him at a party back in ‘99, getting his hopes up for a business deal and then skipping out on him. He later tries to justify it by saying that this helped him steel himself and find the inner strength to succeed at any cost, but it’s thin gruel that – combined with his stereotypical nerdy appearance in the flashback – makes him feel like a knockoff Syndrome from The Incredibles. That guy’s one of my favorite villains in any superhero franchise, so that’s not a favorable comparison.

But what Killian loses out on most is what the Mandarin was built up to be for Tony: an existential threat. Much like the true villain of Iron Man 2 is really Tony’s declining health, Tony’s PTSD is the driving force for the first half of IM3, with the Mandarin fueling it and Killian skeeving on the sidelines. The Mandarin is an impersonal enemy who can attack from anywhere at any time with infinite resources and still leave no trace behind, and he just comes out of nowhere with no warning one day – a nightmare personified. We never see whether Tony connects the co-opted symbols in the Mandarin’s messages with the terrorists who first abducted him, but even without that extra layer of pain, the conflict is as much internal as it is external. After he’s nearly killed by Extremis soldiers, Tony’s terrified; after his house is demolished, he’s running on fumes because his sanity is so close to splitting. It all culminates in his suitless assault on the Mandarin’s supposed home, where his rage is close to bursting through the seams of his icy, snarky façade.

But the twist, as much as it works well in other areas, shows Tony that his fears are unfounded. There is no unknowable monster in the closet, silently gnashing its teeth – just a pissed-off shark with a personal grudge and a lot of money. Once he puts Killian’s face to all of the ominous threats and tormenting, Tony starts to regain his composure fairly quickly, and by the climactic battle his PTSD attacks have completely ceased in a way that feels half like character development and half like a dropped plot. Normally I’ll take an intense personal threat over a force of nature any day, but the Mandarin was set up to be a behemoth that casually uprooted Tony’s life and splintered it into millions of pieces; the perfect antithesis of Ivan Vanko. That, combined with Killian’s underwhelming character, makes the switch to that side of the plot merely enjoyable rather than truly profound.

Also, I don’t know if you noticed, but shirtless, fire-breathing Guy Pearce with dragon tattoos looks fucking stupid.

Killian is a bad character, but his flaws can definitely be polished up within the existing framework of the movie: all you need is a better performance and a motive worth the whole enterprise. Pearce doesn’t have the chops to carry on from Kingsley, so you need someone who can believably convey the dorky innocence of the prologue without descending into camp, before moving on to the sinister sleaze and then screaming, fire-breathing fury; my pick would be Jake Gyllenhaal, who could basically just play his character in Nightcrawler and have the entire film in his palm. (I'm really, really excited to see him as Mysterio, though.)

As for motives, the setup of the film requires Killian’s origin to be something that drove him berserk, but that Tony didn’t even remember – and more could be done with Stark Enterprises’ former arms dealer status and Killian’s employment of wounded soldiers. If Killian created Extremis to genuinely help veterans, came to see Tony as one of the greatest living war profiteers, and then escalated in his insanity until he planned to control the War on Terror in a twisted attempt to give order to the chaos, it might go a long way to give him depth. His plan honestly needs no further justification than mad ambition and the genius to achieve it, but I’ve sat on this for days and I can’t come up with another motive that fits the requirements the movie sets up for that kind of character. Maybe that’s why such a stupid excuse as the party rejection made it into the film.

Now let’s take a different tack, and replace Killian altogether by using what was advertised: the Mandarin is the main villain. Kingsley is one of the most decorated actors ever to grace the MCU, and his performance as the fake Mandarin is already weird and intimidating enough that it can easily be retrofit onto the real terrorist leader without much heavy lifting; you’d lose out on his hilarious Slattery scenes, but it’d be a worthy sacrifice. The existential threat is permanently in the forefront, and in order to make him an adversary who can support a grand confrontation, he can fight utilizing his famous “magic” rings from the comics… except instead of having him be a true sorceror, the rings would be weapons of his own invention enhanced by Chitauri tech his agents recovered from New York. Confronting the architect behind his original abduction, empowered by the weapons he almost died fighting against, would allow Tony to properly reflect on both his origins and his PTSD the whole way through. Kingsley’s Mandarin wouldn’t be a very layered villain – he’s the ringleader of a bunch of terrorist assholes, after all – but his entertaining performance and thematic purpose would give him just enough nuance to elevate him to heights Killian can’t reach.

I like both of these concepts, and I honestly don’t know which would be preferable for what currently stands as Iron Man’s final solo enemy. Both complement his character arc and call back to his beginnings, and both would deliver the knockout performance that one needs to be a distinctive villain in this franchise. It’s up to you to decide which one you’d prefer. In the mean time, we move on to…


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Malekith – (Thor: The Dark World)


”The Asgardians will suffer as we have suffered. I will reclaim the Aether. I will restore our world. And I will put an end to this poisoned universe.”

Spoiler: show
Believe it or not, this guy was the villain I was most looking forward to talking about in Phase 1 and 2. Malekith, inarguably the most bland and forgettable villain in the entire MCU, such a nothing character that everyone tends to forget his name and even his existence unless pressed. It doesn’t help that he’s the driving force of Thor: The Dark World, which I and many others hold as the MCU films’ absolute nadir. But with so many having written him off and forgotten about him, that’s all the more reason to examine and improve him.

So to start, who is Malekith? Where does he come from, what does he want, and what drives him? Well, here’s your problem: the movie actually didn’t bother to explain most of that. In the context of Dark World, Malekith is brushed over as a guy who comes out of nowhere and wants to destroy the universe to return it to darkness. He has a semblance of half-written justification – his people, the Dark Elves, were born in primordial darkness and resent the light that the universe became – but it’s so vague that even he seems to forget it after his introduction. Apparently there were scenes cut for time that would have slightly fleshed him out, involving the family he used to have, but that likely would have just turned him into Doctor Strange’s appallingly weak Kaecilius (whom I will get to eventually, but whom I will never forgive for wasting my favorite living actor).

Does he at least do some interesting stuff onscreen? Not really. His portal-based powers have potential, but they’re not utilized for anything truly interesting until his final fight, a wild brawl through the realms that would be spectacular if there were any weight or character behind it. His minions are faceless screeching goons, and his establishing character moment is a flashback that shows him throwing away the lives of thousands of his people just to save his own, completely undercutting any remotely nuanced edge to his motives. The movie only cares to make him a loathsome enough coward that we cheer when Thor beats the piss out of him, except we don’t care, because there’s no fun in watching the hero fight a boring caricature.

It goes without saying that Christopher Eccleston is utterly wasted here. The former Ninth Doctor is known for being able to go from smolderingly intense and menacing to easygoing and funny, but if you saw most of Malekith’s material without knowing that, you’d think they forgot to hire an actor for the role and just caked the nearest janitor in makeup at the eleventh hour. You can obviously still deliver a knockout performance from behind thick makeup or motion capture, and poor Eccleston is clearly trying to do just that – even behind the costume and voice distortion, a select few of his scenes could have been saved purely on the strength of his efforts. It’s the combination of undercooked writing and the flat bellow he usually has to speak in that kills even the good bits, though.

So… how on earth am I going to improve this guy? There are conceivable ways to make him better without having to make him sympathetic – even the most irredeemable and selfish baddies can have nuance that makes them interesting – but there’s a particular idea I can’t shake that I feel would be worthwhile.

Malekith is motivated by hatred of the light universe, because he and his people were born from the darkness before it. Despite some vagueness about suffering, this comes off as a petty excuse for warmongering, but what if it went deeper? Tweak the intro scene, flesh out that excuse a bit, and you don’t need a potentially insipid family motive to make him compelling. Let’s say the world of light has been slowly etching away the last pockets of the old darkness over the course of eons, and the Dark Elves will die in agony if they have nowhere to run; Malekith easily slots into the role of a freedom fighter, driven to increasingly desperate and vile lengths after endless failed attempts to find a new home for his people, up to and including letting some loyal subjects kamikaze a whole fleet into the opposition. Thor would need to simultaneously battle their destructive insurrection and grapple with the idea of forcing an entire race to die in order to save the rest of the universe; whether he went through with it or found a peaceful solution, it would be a great test for the heir of Asgard.

Or just, y’know, use a version of him who’s more accurate to his character in the comics. I hear he’s a crazy dark sorcerer raised in captivity by trolls or some weird shit. Wouldn’t that be cool?


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Alexander Pierce – (Captain America: The Winter Soldier)


”What if Pakistan marched into Mumbai tomorrow, and you knew they were going to drag your daughter into a soccer stadium for execution, and you could stop it with a flick of a switch… Wouldn’t you? Wouldn’t you all?”

Spoiler: show
I’ve been struggling to articulate why Alexander Pierce – Nick Fury’s duplicitous friend and mentor, Bucky / Winter Soldier’s handler, and the man leading the corruption of SHIELD by HYDRA – is the best villain of Phase 2 and, after Loki, the best villain on this list. Winter Soldier is one of the few movies I haven’t gotten to rewatch in full recently, despite it being my second-favorite film of the phase, and Pierce isn’t exactly a household name like Loki, Vulture, or Thanos. But I’ll try, because he’s a special one.

Pierce couldn’t be a more different HYDRA leader from Red Skull, reflecting both the film’s themes of trying to stay moral in a shady world and the slow improvement in the MCU’s overall writing. He’s evil, but not cartoonishly so – at least, nowhere near his predecessor’s level. The most pointlessly cruel thing he does is kill his maid when she catches Bucky in the house with him, and while he doesn’t hesitate or seem to feel very bad about it afterward, the twinge of regret on his face before he picks up his gun is more than any other single-film MCU villain had gotten by that point. All of his other acts are committed in the name of the mission.

And what a mission it is! Besides the difference in their approach to cruelty, the greatest difference between Red Skull and Pierce is that Pierce actually stands for something. Where Schmidt’s sadism is aimless and worthless due to being stuck in the middle of promising ideas, Pierce wholeheartedly believes that HYDRA’s goal is morally justified. Project Insight – the launch of a helicarrier network that would monitor the global population and basically drone strike anyone who might threaten HYDRA’s “peace” – is as disturbing as one would expect from a faction of fascist agents descended from the actual Nazi Party, but it’s really just a dramatic escalation of existing foreign policies. Thus, it’s more understandable and believable than Malekith or Ronan’s intergalactic genocidal desires, and Pierce’s honest belief that it will fix the world isn’t too far-fetched, so the violence he ruthlessly orders and commits has a strong grounding.

(The film ultimately leaves it ambiguous whether he means what he says throughout the film or is just an egomaniacal psychopath trying to take over the world with thinly veiled excuses of altruism, but I choose to believe the former, because while there are numerous villains who pull off being pure evil and are still compelling, I think characters with depth and nuance tend to be better than cardboard cutouts with auto-twirling moustaches.)

Of course, the best thing Pierce has going for him is that he’s played Robert motherfuckin Redford, quite possibly the most venerated actor yet to grace the MCU. You might expect someone of his caliber to phone it in for a comic book movie, but Redford gives it his all and makes an already promising character stand out in sharp focus. Pierce is perfectly affable until his plans are foiled, but rather than a cover, the calm and friendliness feels at least partly genuine; it’s almost like he honestly expects to turn Cap and Fury to his side if he explains himself properly. If I were feeling more charitable, it could be read that he actually likes his protégé and regrets having to order his assassination. It’s Redford’s subtle, measured performance that even makes that speculation viable, providing a powerful contrast from every other ham-and-cheese scenery-chewer up to that point. He’s like the cool old uncle you don’t know a lot about: wise, friendly, and ever charming, but always vaguely sinister in a way you can’t identify until the cops dig up bones in his backyard.

Ultimately, Pierce meets a deservedly ignoble end for his crimes: shot twice by his former friend, then left to die as the helicarrier he staked so much on crashes onto the SHIELD complex. He’s a true believer to the end, bitterly whispering the “hail HYDRA” creed as everything collapses onto him, his death serving as the capstone to one of the MCU’s greatest films. In an age when Marvel delivering great villains is starting to be more expectation than exception, Pierce may not be the first on anyone’s minds, but the wizened chessmaster deserves more than the footnote status he’s ended up with; other than Loki, he’s the only one in the first two phases who meets the bar so many others would soon hit.


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Ronan the Accuser – (Guardians of the Galaxy)


”I do not recall killing your family. I doubt I’ll recall killing you, either.”

Spoiler: show
Oh, the bitter irony that the best film of Phase 2 has the second-worst villain of all, huh?

Red Skull is just barely serviceable and Malekith is so bad that he’s often completely forgotten, so chances are that when you think “lame MCU villain,” your mind immediately flashes to Lee Pace all done up like a goth nun, impotently waving his hammer at some of the MCU’s best good guys in service of what would turn out to be one of the best bad guys. The Guardians would thankfully get a better baddie to battle in Phase 3, but the brilliance of Ego only serves to shine an even harsher light on Ronan in hindsight.

So there’s not a whole lot more to this guy than there is to Malekith, but he at least has some minuscule characterization. Ronan the Accuser is a zealous Kree warlord (and murderer of Drax’s family) who’s devoted himself to his fanatical hatred of Xandar over centuries of war between their societies, and the deaths of his ancestors therein. The peace treaty that finally ends the war riles him up, so he begrudgingly cooperates with Thanos to find the Power Stone in return for Thanos’s word that Xandar will be slaughtered. That’s all there is to it.

Unfortunately, it’s a little harder to precisely criticize Ronan for being boring (which he is), because unlike someone like Malekith, it’s quite clear that the things that make him so dull are completely intentional. He’s deadly serious all the time, but it ultimately leads to the gag at the climax when he’s completely taken off guard by Star-Lord’s dancing. He’s needlessly cruel and sadistic, but it’s so out-of-proportion (he’s introduced literally bathing in Xandarian blood) that it’s comical. He only ever speaks in a monotone roar, but according to Pace, James Gunn kept urging him to blow his performance to hammier and hammier levels. The intent is clear: he’s the dark, scary, black-and-white cartoon villain who gets clowned on by the more upbeat and funny Guardians.

That would all be great, if it was any fun to watch, which is maddeningly not the case. Ronan is over-the-top, but he’s not blown out in such a way that his scenes are an enduring joy to watch (ex: Willem Dafoe in Spider-Man); his scenes are simply presented and forgotten. Pace is a solid actor who gives it his all, but there’s no flavor to his maniacal energy, no spark when he marches onscreen and starts shouting and hitting things. He’s just shouting. And while it’s ultimately necessary to make that wonderful gag at the end mean something, it’s not worth the many minutes of flavorlessness that accompany him. To make use of the old cliché, he’s all sound and fury, signifying nothing.

But there’s so much there to salvage that you wouldn’t even require a full rewrite to make him work, like Malekith. His hatred for Xandar over the sudden peace treaty is a solid motivation that would shine brighter if it were more than a base excuse for his endless genocidal ranting, especially if Pace were allowed to dial it down for just a few seconds every now and then to remind us that Ronan is a character, not a screeching punching bag with weird makeup. As I’ve said, the final “what are you doing?” gag is the best thing about him, and you could easily extrapolate a few decent character nuances out of it to reinforce the idea that he’s just an angry dick playing to his over-the-top image to make his enemies fear him more. And his betrayal of Thanos is still a solid moment that takes on much starker light now that we know exactly what the Mad Titan is capable of. Just tighten all of that up a bit, and you’ve got a villain people will at least enjoy watching.


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Darren Cross – (Ant-Man)


”Take the suit off or I’ll blow your brains out and peel it off!”

Spoiler: show
In case you haven’t noticed so far, I’m starting off by classifying most of the villains in these two phases by how well-received they were, because most of them are very simple characters and it’s a fine starting measure of how well they worked. Loki, Stane, and Pierce are the ones almost everyone likes; Killian and Ultron are the divisive ones; nobody’s going to argue that Red Skull, Malekith, and Ronan aren’t the most bland. But there are two who don’t quite fit that metric for me, and that’s not really a positive.

I genuinely don’t know what to think about Darren Cross, the evil CEO who kicks off Scott Lang’s journey to superheroics. He occupies the same niche for me as Vanko, in that from scene to scene I can either be going “this is pretty decent” or “holy Christ you’re bad at this”. He’s so weird, a paper-thin baddie who gets more screen time and focus than some of the MCU’s shining standouts and manages to waste nearly all of that time. There are things about him that should work really well on paper, but just flop lifelessly once put onscreen. None of this is down to Corey Stoll, whom I think does a fine job with what little he’s given; he’s not as superb of an actor as some of the innumerable wasted ones in the MCU, but I doubt even the finest thespian could elevate the material here.

What sets Cross apart from the other villains – or at least, what should – is that he is completely out of his mind. Exposure to the shrinking particles is pushing him into a mental breakdown, and his obsessive nature is being ramped up to levels where he eventually sees selling prototype weapons to HYDRA as a viable business plan. He stalks Hope van Dyne in a mad pursuit of unrequited love, turns his subordinates into inside-out molecular blobs for questioning him, and is incapable of seeing anything wrong with killing animals and children. The guy is completely losing it and only getting worse over the course of the story. At his lowest, he dons the Yellowjacket suit and engages in an increasingly smaller-scale battle with Lang, until the only way to put him down is to shrink him to death. It’s a promising arc of uncontrollable degradation the MCU films hadn’t tapped before, and Stoll seems game when he has the chance to let loose, but it just doesn’t work.

You can’t just write a villain as “crazy” and expect that to carry the character. You have to ground the insanity in something, be it a compelling cause, excellent writing, or truly memorable impacts on the wider story. Cross has none of that. The “particles are making him evil” explanation is brushed off immediately as soon as it’s brought up, much like Red Skull’s “super soldier serum makes you look evil if you’re already evil” malarkey, and even if it were explored, I doubt such a stupid plot device would bear much fruit. He’s just written as an evil asshole becoming more and more of an evil asshole with little justification, which isn’t so much an arc as it is a gently sloping plateau of tripe. At least his actions are somewhat entertaining, but all of his promising scenes end up passing by without much impact; only once he becomes the ranting, cackling Yellowjacket does he at least become an effectively goofy comedy villain for a few minutes.

He’s a silhouette of a decent villain, sketched and then thrown away. Salvaging him should theoretically be as simple as salvaging Vanko, but other than the base idea of him going crazy and some of the scenes where he threatens Lang and Hope more personally (and Stoll is allowed to… you know, act), there’s just so little about him that’s distinctive. Take away the particle excuse, and he’s a bootleg Obadiah Stane or a more competent Justin Hammer; try to make him more sympathetic and focus on his personal connection to the protagonists, and he’s Killian with lower stakes. So what if he weren’t just another cookie-cutter evil CEO?

I really like villains who start from a small place and have to work their way up through sabotage and trickery, and if Cross were a low-level employee instead of the guy in the big chair, that would be a good fit for a guy with grandiose ambitions fueled by obsessive psychosis. Cross could start as an invisible face in the corporate chain, then gradually become a threat to the heroes by ascending through Pym Technologies on a wave of mysterious “accidents” and framed firings (either at HYDRA’s behest or for his own delusional needs), until he finally has his hands on the Yellowjacket and other prototype technologies. Instead of hiring Lang to pull off a heist right away, Pym would go into hiding fearing an infiltrator in his company, and would need Lang to use the Ant-Man suit for spy work to find out what’s going on. It’s not a perfect solution, but it’s one that hasn’t been done in one of these movies before.


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Ultron – (Avengers: Age of Ultron)


”When the Earth starts to settle, God throws a stone at it. And believe me, He’s winding up.”

Spoiler: show
And so we come to this. Ultron, the Big Bad bridging Loki and Thanos, the hyped-up incarnation of an extremely popular comics villain, and widely held as one of the biggest letdowns in the entire MCU. There are those who adore him, and just as many who vocally loathe him. If you’ve read this far, then you no doubt have a strong opinion about this one. I, for one, don’t love or hate Ultron. Ultron frustrates me. There’s so much there to appreciate and dig into, but for every positive there’s an annoying negative… which kind of sums up the whole film, but that’s not what I’m here for.

From Ultron’s very first scene, in which the burgeoning A.I. puts together his purpose and turns against the Avengers, the cracks are visible. Ultron was built by Tony and Banner after the former’s experiences in Avengers and Iron Man 3, to serve as the planetary protector the Avengers couldn’t be – a “suit of armor around the world”, as Tony puts it – before going rogue with the realization that his mission is paradoxical. The scene where he awakens and lashes out over the barbarism of humanity is visually well done, and James Spader’s performance shines from the first line, perfectly conveying the fear and disgust of a newborn A.I. unequipped to deal with a flood of human horrors. Unfortunately, he goes rogue way too quickly (he starts acting defiantly 32 seconds after waking up, and violently rebels about 20 seconds later), which muddles his motives and makes his actions feel abrupt and nonsensical.

That general sentiment leeches out from this scene to the rest of his arc. Despite his tendency toward long monologues about what he’s doing, his exact reasoning for his actions is poorly explained and clearly changes multiple times with little provocation; the best I can tell is that he’s so hateful of humanity that he wants to punish them by wiping most of them out before protecting the survivors, but even this is disputed and doesn’t explain everything. Joss Whedon describes him as a creature of disturbed emotion acting on rage rather than logic, and that’s very clear from his very human arrogance, as well as his desperate and paradoxical need to be validated by an audience; after he’s abandoned by Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch, the only people he genuinely likes, he swiftly abducts Black Widow and remarks that he doesn’t “have anyone else” as he explains his plans to her. These are interesting character traits that play into his best scenes, but in a character who barely justifies himself, they only obfuscate the picture further.

There’s just too much trying to be done with him; I can barely even dig into his appreciation for religious iconography or his obsession with creating a perfect body, both of which comes close to grounding him in something understandable, but which respectively end up feeling like window dressing and a plot device for Vision’s birth. Since none of his many character traits are in central focus and his origin was barely rushed through, the result is an annoyingly opaque villain who’s hard to glom onto, only working in scene-by-scene isolation. This is especially frustrating because he’s in one of the most critical positions in the MCU, his actions leading to the rise of Scarlet Witch and Vision, the self-imposed exile of Banner, and the destruction of Sokovia, the last of which shapes Civil War and thus most of Phase 3. He should be a knockout, but he’s the rare comic book villain who feels overwritten rather than under.

I’ve barely touched on his personality in all of this, since it’s so clouded by his overstuffed motives. His key trait aside from disgust at humanity is his hatred of his “father”, and of anyone comparing him to Tony. It’s not elaborated on much, despite being fertile ground, so I only bring it up because of how similar they are; both are relentlessly sarcastic wise-asses with hot streaks of arrogance, which… doesn’t always work for Ultron. I don’t have the same blistering animosity toward Joss Whedon that much of the post-backlash internet does, but his “quip-a-minute” style of writing is a problem that plagues both Age of Ultron and Ultron himself. He gets a lot of funny one-liners and Spader is so ridiculously charismatic that he makes most of them work, and someone with nearly infinite bodies and all of the world’s knowledge would probably act like a cocky douche, but the way it’s executed just sticks out as unnatural for me in a way it rarely does for any other character. It feels forced, particularly with the lack of real focus on his ties to Tony, and while I definitely prefer it to humorless maroons like Malekith and Ronan, it’s not earning high marks from me.

Ultron is a terribly flawed character, overstuffed to the point of bursting and only capable of acting in pure service to moving the plot forward; his one saving grace is Spader’s performance, which at least keeps him entertaining. And yet, all you need to fix him is to give him some breathing room and clarity. The pieces are all there: an unstoppable A.I. closely tied to Tony’s actions and the events of The Avengers, hell-bent on wiping out most of humanity for the sake of protecting it, providing a final foe for the original Avengers before Civil War and the arrival of Thanos. He’s got solid effects work and a killer performance backing him up, and the existing plot is still fine with a stronger foundation; all he needs is to have more than a minute to go rogue and some time to explain himself, and he’s golden.

If there’s one major alteration I would make among all of this, it’s more of an expansion on an existing idea that’s left ambiguous. The film never properly brings up whether Ultron knows or cares about the impending threat he was programmed to stop, as he’s abandoned all pretense of altruism by the time he’s threatening to recreate the meteor that killed the dinosaurs. I would have it so that the Mind Stone’s integration into his programming explicitly gave him knowledge outside the Avengers’ purview, expanding on what Tony saw when he flew through the Chitauri wormhole and showing him the might of Thanos bearing down on Earth. It would go another step toward making his “killing Earth to save it” ideology mean something in the context of the wider MCU, and give Thanos a better measure of buildup among the earthbound heroes. But even then, if that wasn't the case and he just settled on killing people because he hates them, just having him clearly aim for this like his comics counterpart would be better than keeping him muddled.
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Re: KK Analyzes MCU Villains - Phase 1 and 2

Postby Ladki96 » Wed Apr 24, 2019 7:14 pm

This (and future posts) should be an article KK ^^
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Re: KK Analyzes MCU Villains - Phase 1 and 2

Postby gisambards » Thu Apr 25, 2019 2:34 am

Ultron is probably my least favourite (even though Malekith is objectively the worst) just because of the wasted potential. Ultron is a really cool villain in the comics, but what makes him a good villain there just doesn't work for Joss Whedon's style at all. Even with the thing of him having bits of Tony Stark's personality (which isn't really used anyway - there's only one instance of it actually being shown and it's done as a demonstration just after we've been reminded it's supposed to be a thing), I don't think it works and it makes him way less threatening that a robot that wants to wipe out humanity would be so human.

I personally would defend Joss Whedon, Justice League notwithstanding, but I just don't think his style works for certain characters, and this is the big failing of Ultron. I actually think a better villain for that film, if it retained Whedon's style, would have been Kang the Conqueror (although I'm not sure if Fox owned him at that point). He's much better suited as the kind of villain who the comics take seriously but who could be made funny, in that he's quite famous but mostly forgotten about and already quite unironically silly - whereas comics Ultron is able to be taken seriously as a serious villain and popular enough that it seems a bit of a waste to deviate from him so strongly. The personality and James Spader could have remained almost exactly the same, and again would have made more sense as he'd have been human.

Obviously that would take out the drama of Tony having created the villain, but they don't do much with that anyway and Civil War would have if anything worked better (in that they seem to blame the Avengers more for the collateral damage in New York and Sokovia than for their members' links to the parties actually responsible). It would also have taken away the Thanos link and Vision's origin, but the former was pretty tenuous as-is and Vision's origin is so different to the comics anyway, so he could just as easily be built by someone else (in the comics his link to Ultron is important because it means Ultron considers him his son, but they didn't use that so there's no need for him to be linked to Ultron at all). They could even keep the better of Ultron's two motivations - Kang's from the future, so they could have had him be trying to stop a future where Thanos won.

Also, I really hated how Ultron looked. Another argument for Kang because he always looks dumb, but Ultron usually looks cool (and even does in this movie, in his first scene) but then they made him look dumb instead, which was dumb.

TL;DR: KANG THE CONQUEROR, and also Ultron is wasted on many levels which I think is worse than just being boring.
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Re: KK Analyzes MCU Villains - Phase 1 and 2

Postby iMURDAu » Fri Apr 26, 2019 8:11 pm

it’s hard to sell Nazi toys to kids


Is it? You put Nazi's in Roblox or Fortnite and you'll sell skins all day long. They don't teach history in elementary.

Also, I don’t know if you noticed, but shirtless, fire-breathing Guy Pearce with dragon tattoos looks fucking stupid.


He looks like he did a good ol' bodyslide straight out of the 1980's into the 2010's. Too funny when I saw it the first time.

He occupies the same niche for me as Vanko, in that from scene to scene I can either be going “this is pretty decent” or “holy Christ you’re bad at this”


You were talking about Ivan Vanko but you could have just as easily been talking about the director who was a patchwork of Edgar Wright and, idk, another person or peoples? God, I fucking hate the Ant-Man movies. They're just so bad and the first one is absolutely pointless. Except for the very end of the second movie there's almost nothing tying those films to the rest of the MCU. A Falcon cameo? Wow.

His key trait aside from disgust at humanity is his hatred of his “father”, and of anyone comparing him to Tony. It’s not elaborated on much, despite being fertile ground, so I only bring it up because of how similar they are; both are relentlessly sarcastic wise-asses with hot streaks of arrogance, which… doesn’t always work for Ultron.


A good piece of dialogue with Ultron explaining why he doesn't like being compared to the human that created him would've done a lot for that movie. Ultron is all over the place. He's childish, churlish, wants company, hates people, quotes classic Disney songs, and wants to destroy but plays with his food. He's like an all powerful 13 year old voiced by James Spader. I was more upset that Ultron was dealt with in a single movie. Like, exsqueeze me. Baking powder? You're gonna tell me they rounded up all the Ultron bots and all traces of Ultron are erased from everything? C'mon if we can find a semi trailer full of Virtual Boys decades later then Ultron has to be in Endgame. That's not a spoiler if it's true, I haven't seen the movie yet!
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Re: KK Analyzes MCU Villains - Phase 1 and 2

Postby Marcuse » Fri Apr 26, 2019 8:23 pm

it’s hard to sell Nazi toys to kids


With respect, Imperial Stormtroopers from Star Wars are literally exactly this. Lindsay Ellis had a good video about how Disneyworld now does a parade of them down main street in a display of "obedience and strength". They totally do sell Nazi toys to kids, they just don't call them Nazis.
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