The MCU infinity saga, the myth of our times

I've been showing my 10-year old the MCU movies and reliving the 2010s. The saga is a terrific curriculum for sharing some timeless values.

“Uh, seems like the other avengers movies were definitely emergencies. They were invaded by an alien army and he didn’t use it then??”

Me and my 10-year old son watched Captain Marvel recently. In my estimation, this is where the Marvel Cinematic Universe began a steady decline from the heights of Phase 3 into the depths of…whatever the new low is for the movie franchise. I haven’t watched the last several shows or movies.

What he was responding to was the revelation that Nick Fury had a special pager to beep Captain Marvel that he suddenly pulled out when people started vanishing. Everything in that movie was pretty forced into the greater Infinity Stones saga.

We recently completed that saga, a little spring/summertime project that has occupied most of my Friday nights for the last few months. I love watching movies and sharing a really fun and rewarding movie series with a child over popcorn and movie-style snacks in the comfort of your own home is about as good as it gets.

I’m not entirely sure where in the MCU we’ll stop. Endgame is a good stopping spot but I think we’ll tack on the next two Spider-Man movies and probably Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 and then be done. It’s been a lot of fun to revisit these movies, which in my estimation actually age quite well. Everything else that came after I have found in serious want.

Unlike the newer, crappier movies, the saga that takes us through the infinity stones is a great mythology to share with a son in order to indirectly teach some good morals and cultural/spiritual values. I’ve noticed there are some recurring themes in the best ones which really stand out. Overall the saga is about the proper use of power, which is a story perhaps best told via the drama of superheroes but ultimately has relevance for us all.

I’ve ranked them for you here, although I’d probably change the rankings if I did it again, and offered a summation of what I took as the main point and would want my son to take away as the main point.

Don’t read this if you haven’t watched these movies and would rather they not be spoiled.

#10 Iron-Man

You got a family?

Yes, and I will see them when I leave here. And you, Stark?

No.

So you're a man who has everything... and nothing.

The foundation of the whole MCU!

What this movie gets right is what every subsequent movie was built upon. Some of the core ingredients are:

1. Character based story telling. Each movie in the marvel universe will land or fail based on how the story advances the character in their own personal quest to effectively manage the responsibility that comes from their powers. Plot holes and continuation errors don’t really matter if you get the characters deeply right.

2. Nothing is serious except the core lesson for the character. Whether a movie is more or less intense, Marvel movies are known for dropping jokes throughout the whole story. That’s gotten a bit out of hand in modern movies actually, they don’t pause long enough for you to feel moments. The better Marvel movies land the big moments with gravitas and seriousness, but they make sure those moments revolve around the character and their personal struggles rather than the context, which might be something ridiculous like a space alien invasion.

That latter point is essential. Most of these characters and stories don’t work if you take them too seriously, but they also don’t work if you’re not emotionally invested in the character. Robert Downey Jr’s tone and acting skill provided the template for giving us a character that feels real and important so we can latch onto that amidst the cartoony adventure he goes on.

It’s all ultimately what JRR Tolkien would call faerie story. These movies offer escape, recovery, and consolation.

Lesson for a son: Meaning in life comes from purpose and purpose comes from responsibility.

#9 The Avengers

There was an idea, Stark knows this, called the Avengers Initiative. The idea was to bring together a group of of remarkable people to see if they could become something more. To see if they could work together when we needed them to, to fight the battles that we never could.

Phil Coulson died, still believing in that idea. In heroes.

Well, it's a good old-fashioned notion.

I was actually about done with superhero movies when Avengers came out. Or at least almost done. I thought Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight was probably the final word on comic book superhero movies. He brought some grit and seriousness to the genre that I figured it’d be hard to come back from.

Some of the hype around the Iron-Man return and Avengers run-up lead me to catch up by watching Captain America and Thor, both of which I found to be solid but nothing to Nolan’s Batman movies.

Then I saw the Avengers, which was one of the most surprising and enjoyable theater trips I can remember.

Lesson for a son: Saving the day is usually a team sport and working as a team requires self-sacrifice.

#8 Guardians of the Galaxy: Vol. II

Listen to me! You are a god. If you kill me, you'll be just like everybody else!

What's so wrong with that?

This is a very family-focused movie, which theoretically makes it an easy translation for a son. Not sure my kid got it, we watched this one in a larger group with a lot of interruptions so it was harder to explain or emphasize the key moments of the movie in the same way as the others.

A major takeaway in this movie is embracing the need to crawl into the dirt and endure all the gritty elements of life and relationships. There’s a dozen poignant little moments that all make the same point.

• The golden people being above sex as a means of reproduction but growing their offspring in vats to be genetically perfect.

• The golden people fighting battles via drones like they’re just playing a video game. Lots of golden people metaphors in this movie along these lines.

• Yondu buckling up his pants after enjoying the company of a sex robot and looking out a window feeling empty and alone.

• Nebula abstaining from killing Gamora because what she really wants is a relationship.

• Ultimately, Peter’s father Ego aiming to replace the whole cosmos with himself rather than trying to put up with the frustrations of being in actual relationships with other flawed and selfish creatures.

Lesson for a son: Life is about relationships, not running from the pain of human interaction.

#7 Captain America: Winter Soldier

Those hostages could have died, Nick.

I sent the greatest soldier in history to make sure that didn't happen.

Soldiers trust each other. That's what makes it an army. Not a bunch of guys running around shooting guns.

While all of these movies relate to the responsible use of power, many of them are more personal and less political in application. This one is a little more political since the direct foil/challenge to Captain America and his life’s mission is the news that the evil Hydra organization has infiltrated S.H.I.E.L.D. itself and the plan to build gunships which can potentially “Minority Report” criminals before they get started is actually going to be used to vaporize threats to Hydra.

Captain America chooses to stand against compulsion while also choosing loyalty to his old pal Bucky Barnes. On the way, he also finds a reliable sidekick in Falcon and wins over the untrusting Black Widow and Nick Fury. Ultimately, as he will again later, the Captain chooses to put faith in actual people rather than in systems or policies.

Lesson for a son: Build great relationships and put your trust in community.

#6 Doctor Strange

It’s not about you.

That’s what the Ancient One, played by Tilda Swinton, tells Doctor Strange moments before she passes on, leaving the responsibility for guarding the sanctums and universe’s reality from extra-universal beings to the doctor.

The whole movie our guy is trying to recover dexterity to the hands which had made him so special as a surgeon so he can recover the lifestyle and accolades he had before. Instead he learns he will likely never get it back and could actually do considerably more to serve and protect the universe…but he needs to do it in obscurity and at great personal cost.

He cannot fully step into becoming a powerful hero until he accepts that doing so cannot be done for his own benefit, only the benefit of others. The bit where he risks eternally sacrificing himself in order to stop Dormammu is one of the better moments in the entire franchise, imo.

Lesson for a son: Your life is ultimately about service to another, not your own ego or gratification.

#5 Spider-Man: Homecoming

Can't you just be a friendly neighborhood Spider-Man?

Both the movie’s villain and hero are struggling through a populist, working class hero conundrum. The villain, the vulture, sees rich and powerful people grabbing value and privilege for themselves (or at least that’s how he sees it) and not looking out for the little guy. So he decides to use that understanding to elevate himself and feel justified in doing so.

Spider-Man is struggling with his humble ambition to focus on watching out for the little guy in his own neighborhood when he feels his power could be better spent on grander projects.

After getting caught taking on a bit more than he can chew, Spider-Man focuses on normal life only to find the opportunity for heroism unexpectedly showing up at his prom date’s door. So he takes it on and thereby proves he’s up to taking on bigger challenges, only to still choose to focus on being more of a Good Samaritan who’s concern is the person in need alongside the road he’s walking rather than the grand adventures abroad.

Lesson for a son: First, clean your own room and thus be worthy and equipped for what’s next.

#4 Thor Ragnarok

“Asgard is not a place. It’s a people.”

Ragnarok and Black Panther are quietly about the same thing and are among the more political of the MCU movies. They’re also both exceptionally ethnically-based, despite containing universal themes for anyone.

In my estimation, Black Panther is overly political and less enjoyable than any of the movies on this list and certainly less so than Ragnarok, which is one of the best times you’ll have in any of these movies.

Black Panther inverts the typical black vs white story by imagining a super advanced and powerful nation in Africa rather than a technologically limited and easily exploited one. This nation, Wakanda, is withdrawn and isolationist on a scale beyond Pat Buchanan’s wildest dreams.

Director Ryan Coogler imagines this world in order to tell the story of the African diaspora in America. To conceive of all black people as a brotherhood who are up against it is not a particularly African notion but a distinctly American one, and this tale finds its beginning in Oakland, CA where a Wakandan prince is planning a black panther (like the actual revolutionary/terrorist group from the 60s, not the superpowered king of Wakanda) operation. The challenge of the movie is a sort of “MLK Jr or Malcom X?” path for blacks, once imagined to have the advance powers of Wakanda. Anyways, Black Panther has to deal with the shortcomings of his father and ancestors, who isolated Wakanda from these problems, and try to salvage the tradition in a more responsible way.

Ragnarok deals with a similar idea. Thor learns about the blood and violence at the root of Asgard’s empire and has to forsake all of the ill-gotten power and wealth of the past in order to protect his people from the return of his older sister Hella, who wants to return Asgard to the days of plunder and imperial expansion.

These movies offer the best kind of liberal story telling, in which there is respect for what came before in the reforms and new thinking that guide the shaping of the future. Both Odin and the black panthers of the past are given nods for the weights they bore, even as the sons try a new direction. Ragnarok balances that line more artfully in addition to being a funnier, better paced, and better looking movie.

The ethnic story-telling in Ragnarok is actually on behalf of the Jewish people. As a half-Jew (mother came from Russia) who grew up in the refugee/diaspora out in New Zealand, the director Taika Waititi is fascinated by the idea of Jews as a people tied together by something other than a specific homeland. I’m pretty sure his hilarious movie/TV Show “what we do in the shadows” is also a heavily Jewish-centric work in which the vampires are fill-ins for Jews, presumed by outsiders to be horrifying monsters living amongst regular people but in reality living absurd and funny lives. Seinfeld and Curb your Enthusiasm are much the same, capturing the Jewish experience of living in America (how come all these goyim don’t understand the laws by which we have to live??? You don’t double dip!)

None of that is necessarily easily translated to white Americans like me and my son, yet the there is universality in the “you must shoulder the responsibility of your father, watch out for your people, and try to do so better than he did.”

This is definitely one of the most enjoyable of the MCU movies and the big moment where Thor is able to realize the lessons from his father in order to be who he need to be for Asgard is as terrific a moment as any in the entire franchise.

Lesson for a son: What you take from your father should be both respected and reformed.

#3 Captain America: Civil War

When you can do the things that I can, but you don't, and then the bad things happen, they happen because of you.

That’s the main theme of this one. The movie cleverly avoids the old formulation of “with great power comes great responsibility.” Instead, they introduce the MCU Peter Pan with young Tom Holland saying the quote above.

Poignant, true to how a teenager would talk, and also perfectly timed within the movie as Tony Stark (Iron Man) is wrestling with a moral conundrum which has placed him opposite Captain America. Stark is racked with guilt over some of the negative consequences of his decisions while trying to save the world. He’s opted for accountability and oversight while Captain America is afraid to hand over decision-making responsibility for righteous action to a government body.

It’s actually a great debate. Obviously most of us need oversight, but then “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” Who watches the watchmen?

Spider-man actually has the right answer all along, which has struck me recently as a sort of formulation of “might makes right” but not in the sense that we think of it, in which whatever the strong choose to do is regarded as right. Instead, in the sense that right can only be made by those with the strength to do it.

Tony Stark, Captain America, and Spider-Man cannot pass off their responsibility to weaker watchmen, they must be accountable for what they do with their might.

Lesson for a son: You can’t run from your responsibilities, only you can shoulder them.

#2 Guardians of the Galaxy

“What did the galaxy ever do for you? Why would you want to save it?”

“Because I'm one of the idiots who lives in it!”

On review, Guardians of the Galaxy may be the best of all the MCU movies. It doesn’t have the grandiosity and stakes of the final two Avengers movies, but the immersion that director James Gunn achieved and the emotional payoffs at the end are pretty special. Like most everyone else, I had no idea who the guardians were before walking into this movie and had no idea what was up with the talking raccoon with a talking tree or anything else. My main relationship with any of it was with “Star-Lord” actor Chris Pratt as either goofball Andy from Parks and Rec or humble Scott Hatteberg from Money-ball.

It actually took me a second viewing to really appreciate Pratt’s Star-Lord as a cunning and sarcastic hero rather than waiting for him to slip and fall like Andy would, revealing a total goober underneath.

Taking off into all these foreign worlds with foreign alien cultures while grounded by old classic hits played on Star-Lord’s cassette is about as good as it gets in this whole franchise.

It’s also great getting the classic “anti-hero decides to take responsibility for his neighbors” formula that has worked so well for much of Hollywood’s history. Clint Eastwood in space…if Clint Eastwood was talkative and wise-cracking rather than stoic and laconic.

Lesson for a son: Growing up means rising up to protect those around you.

#1 Avengers: Infinity War/Endgame

“Reality is often disappointing. That is, it was. Now, reality can be whatever I want."

Infinity War marks the Avengers saga as an ultimately conservative story. The Avengers are blessed with god-like powers but they use them primarily to protect and serve the existing order. Thanos sees the existing order as hopelessly broken and in need of desperate reform.

He’s actually the revolutionary figure, the man of the left as it were, seeking to liberalize and overthrow rather than protect and conserve. Naturally he falls into the excesses common of the revolutionary and plans a massive genocide on a scale that would make Mao or Stalin blush.

Meanwhile the Avengers won’t even sacrifice a single life willingly in order to achieve their outcome, seeking to instead work within a more limited framework of action. Star-Lord reluctantly agrees to sacrifice Gamora, at her own volition, only for it to vanish into nothing. Captain America refuses to sacrifice Vision and Scarlet Witch does it reluctantly only for it to once again amount to nothing when Thanos reverses time to undo her sacrifice.

The only sacrifices that actually work in defeating Thanos are the ones undertaken willingly. Black Widow sacrifices herself to get the Soul Stone, ultimately Iron-Man gives his life to save the universe. Those sacrifices work, the sacrifices of others for their own supposed good or the good of the universe always fail. It’s a very Christian-theme that ultimately underpins the whole saga.

Lesson for a son: Heroes self sacrifice.

Movie night with the son has been a blast. I’m going to have to put together some other movie collections so we can keep this up for years to come, then I’ll repeat it with the younger boy. Tonight we’re actually including the younger one (five years old) and watching a Godzilla movie. I have a few movies/series in mind for my daughter(s) as well. Clueless, Pride and Prejudice (BBC version), Emma, Sense and Sensibility, Mean Girls, etc.

The newer MCU films don’t nail the Tolkien fairie tale elements right and are overly political (i.e. propagandistic) and thus elevate the moral of the story over the character. It’s a real shame…but fortunately they finished the infinity saga properly before nosediving.