I’m not sure if I’ve said this before but these two are probably two of the strongest to watch together in a Replay episode.

As Taylor and I have journeyed our way through the Replay series, we have had some, let’s say “odd”, mashups. I mean, even the past two episodes covering GOTG1 and CATWS and GOTG2 and AOU are not precisely on the same level. Actually, they aren’t even on the same planet as each other. But this week, we have an excellent pairing that not only goes well together but are pretty vital homework films for the upcoming Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania film. That being said, I put a little warning that Civil War had the potential to nearly be its’ own episode, just due to all the massive repercussions from it, so we are a little skewed in our time allotted to each film in this episode. Either way, this is a great episode that we are hoping you guys love hearing. If you haven’t had a chance to listen, click the button below to find your listening platform of choice, or start listening live from the link provided.

Starting with Ant-Man himself, I want to discuss Scott Lang as a person. I might just be dumb but I will say the first few times I’ve seen the movie, I didn’t put together that Scott is gifted in electrical engineering. And once I noticed that I realized his tinkering around with the suit and his ability to build and create things like he did during the initial heist at Hank Pym’s home made a lot of sense. I mean, this guy is really gifted, and while we are used to him being the comic relief, which might distract a little from his vast knowledge, it’s definitely important to note. He isn’t just a common criminal and Hank knew that.

Now to the suit itself. The most interesting thing about this film, in my opinion, is the history of the suit more than anything else. We get a lot of origins from Marvel but most don’t have an origin inside the origin. Think about it, watching Cap become the first super soldier doesn’t tie to any other stories in history about super soldiers. Same with Iron Man, there was no Iron Man before Tony there was. No such thing as a man flying around in a metal suit. They started that themselves. But Scott in his origin movie inherits a suit that not only has a history but also has a tragic story tied to it. A story you would think would have been released with Black Widow’s choice to release all SHIELD and Hydra files. We actually don’t learn until the next movie we are going to discuss that these files were still heavily encrypted, but I have to say, I read this as a move from the Russo brothers to try and close that chapter a little since it appeared no other director wanted to touch what they had done in CATWS. Either way, logically speaking, a man like Darren if he wanted to would have had a team working on those files and the Ant-Man wouldn’t have been a myth any longer.

I don’t want to stray from the history of the suit because it really is important to what we know about the wider MCU and for the future with Ant-Man 3. For one, Hank used this suit during the Cold War, a time when the only hero known was still frozen in ice. He operated very much like Cap did in WW2 and it’s interesting to see the effects Hank and Janet had on history that the majority of the world doesn’t even know happened. However, I did mention the tragic aspect of this history, which is that Janet, who also wore a suit, went subatomic to stop a nuke and disappeared into the Quantum Realm. This forces Hank into his own form of retirement, but it introduces us to something we actually see later in the film, which I totally don’t remember from earlier viewings. We enter the Quantum Realm when Ant-Man goes subatomic to stop Darren and actually, he sends Darren there as well. That first glimpse, little did we know, would begin quite the journey with Ant-Man, as his second and third films are based in the Quantum Realm as well. It makes his films probably the most cohesive, but also makes even the first one more important than we will ever know, as the Quantum Realm is also how they got time travel to work in Endgame.

I promised myself not to go off too much about the Quantum Realm as we will have plenty to talk about with that with our Ant-Man 3 predictions episode. So instead I want to keep us in the realm of Darren, who is very clearly unhinged. Hank mentions that Darren’s use and trials of some of the technology that Darren has been creating have affected his mind and leaves us to conclude this is why he is so off-kilter. But in reality, it only makes me more intrigued about the relationship he and Hank shared, as Hank created the monster of a person that Darren becomes. I mean, at one point he even had his daughter so alienated she help vote him out of his own company. This is one of the few movies I wish we had a prequel to, just because Darren shares a strange relationship with Hope and Hank, which we only see glimpses of as Scott comes into the fold. But it makes Darren an interesting villain, one that grew beneath others’ failures and disappointments. Sounds a lot like Hydra.

Did I say Hydra? Yea, I did, because the movie did too. It was a small comment made, could’ve been a throwaway line in itself, but Darren was selling his Yellowjacket suit to members of Hydra. I don’t remember this from before, but keep in mind at this point SHIELD, with Hydra wrapped inside of it, fell roughly two movies ago. We see in AOU that the Avengers are taking out Hydra bases while on the search for the Tesseract, but we’re kind of led to assume after that that Hydra is pretty much gone. And I wouldn’t have an issue with them mentioning Hydra in this film if it led to more than it does. Now, I will give the benefit of the doubt to Marvel and say, by this point, we are barreling towards our purple grape storyline, so things such as Hydra can be phased out as the world itself is about to be attacked by more aliens with powerful rocks. So I will say, the only way this throwaway line won’t disappoint me is if Hydra is brought back up in Phase 5, since it was pretty absent from all of Phase 4. The line confirms the existence of Hydra and that means I want to see where they are and what they’re up to.

The last thing I want to touch on before I open the can of worms of Civil War is that Hank at one point mentions that he no longer wears the suit due to the toll it took on him. Now, the way he sets this up makes it sound like it is more than just the emotional toll of losing his wife. With this statement comes my concern now for Scott, who has been wearing and utilizing the suit for quite a few years now in the current MCU. If a toll can be taken on someone who uses the suit often, then I think we have good reason to believe Scott might be in danger. And honestly, it does make sense, as I can’t see how shrinking and enlarging yourself all the time can be physically good for anyone. Just some food for thought as we come up on the culmination of Ant-Man’s trilogy.

I have to be honest, this is about to be a lot as we move to Civil War. First, a disclaimer is that Taylor and I are very passionately Team Cap, and so in all honesty, I will leave that out of this post as much as possible. If you would like to hear our reasoning, give the episode a listen as we both explain our feelings, but I feel you all don’t need to read how much we don’t really like Iron Man. I’ll give an honest attempt to avoid bashing Tony, but I will apologize now if I do.

I want to start with the opening scene/battle, which is where Cap & Co. takes on Crossbones aka Rumlow from CATWS. Two things I want to say. One: Crossbones was an extremely wasted character in my opinion, as he’s an interesting villain who would have actually been even more interesting to see now that Sam is Cap. I do like the continuity of him being the person they’re after, especially as it relates to this being Cap’s movie, but I think it would’ve been more interesting to utilize him more aggressively later in one of Sam’s storylines. My other thing is simply this: I hate what happens in this film regarding Wanda, specifically as it all relates to this scene. Had she not removed the bomb from the location in the market, people would have died. Obviously, we saw what happened when she tried to move the bomb elsewhere. Unfortunately, this Wanda is not yet at the place she is when she embraces being the Scarlet Witch and so she did what she could to save lives. I find the whole thing that happened and the blaming that took place frustrating. Not to mention, Crossbones was essentially stealing a virus that who knows what he would have done with.

With this same thought, when General Ross is discussing the battles and subsequent deaths/destruction that follow, he mentions New York and Sokovia. Granted, Sokovia was 100% Tony’s fault, but what Ultron did with the city was something they were the only ones qualified to stop. Same with New York, had the Avengers not been there, there simply would have been a successful alien invasion and thousands would have died. Better yet, the government would’ve nuked the island of Manhattan. Imagine that. So I have to say, some of his points on why the Avengers need governing don’t really strike me as their fault.

I can’t in good faith talk about this film without of course bringing up Bucky and how much I love him. I’m kidding (not really), but I do have to say multiple times in this film we see The Winter Soldier and we see Bucky, and I think Sebastian Stan’s ability to shift these two personas back and forth is incredible. On top of that, I think it really shows that Bucky does pull his punches and has no urge to kill people, even though he’s highly qualified in doing so. But when The Winter Soldier appears, that’s a different story. The Winter Soldier singlehandedly took out just about all the Avengers and if anyone forgot or wasn’t paying attention, technically would’ve shot Tony in the head. With Bucky, we see him pull his punches especially with Spider-Man, as he isn’t trying to kill him, but also realizes there’s a whole kid under the mask. It’s just an interesting comparison we see and this film really is where we see the two sides, rather than in TFAWS, where we see more of Bucky in control of himself.

Speaking of Spider-Man, I have to say something for all you Team Iron Man folks out there and you might not like it. If Spider-Man knew the whole situation, if he didn’t blindly follow and trust Tony Stark because he’s Tony Stark, you couldn’t tell me he wouldn’t have been Team Cap. I mean, he even makes a comment about helping the little guy because he can that us watching can see register in Tony’s face that he knows this kid doesn’t agree with him. I find it pretty interesting that Peter doesn’t ask for more details for a fight he is being flown across the country for, but I also understand that he’s blinded by the offer. Speaking of being flown across the country though, I have to say I still don’t love how Spider-Man was introduced into the MCU. It felt a little lazy and abrupt, unlike Ant-Man’s inclusion, which felt natural since we had just seen his movie. It’s still a main complaint of mine, but over the years I have grown to accept it for what it is.

The last thing I want to get into here is the final fight between Cap, Bucky, and Tony. As a Bucky girl, I will always defend him as far as this situation because he had no control over himself when he killed the Starks and he is burdened with remembering the kills. But I won’t say I don’t understand Tony’s anger, I just think he reacted like an idiot. Cap 100% should have told him, but fighting the way they did was ridiculous, allowing Zemo to get exactly what he wanted. The comparison between Tony and T’Challa was insane, as we see T’Challa speaking to the man who killed his father days ago and stopping his suicide, while Tony was tearing through two super soldiers for a loss he experienced years back. It was an interesting character study in my opinion, even if I found the fight ridiculous for being the reason it all ended.

I lied, this is the last thing I want to discuss. This pivots slightly from Civil War, more so dealing with the bigger effects of the ending scene. We see Cap extend the olive branch to Tony and in this film, you truly sit there and think they will work it all out. Yet, we obviously see this isn’t true, as in Infinity War, Tony does everything he can to avoid calling Cap, and then in Endgame, dared to blame Cap for not being there. I know I said I would try not to bash Tony, this just makes me so angry as he makes it everyone else’s fault but his own. This is pretty much the theme of Tony’s character starting in this film. Either way, this film’s ending is so critical to moving the rest of the MCU to its’ final moments.

This is the final Replay episode for the time being, as we are less than one week away from Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. This is surely going to be filling up our timeline as far as coverage for the next few weeks, so keep an eye out for our predictions episode, coming out today. If you haven’t gotten your tickets yet, get a move on! We’re excited and we hope all of you are as well because Marvel is about to blow your mind, so let’s talk about it.

Image: “Ant-Man”, Wikipedia

Image: “Captain America: Civil War”, Disney

Another two great films to continue our replay with.

Riding off the tail of our last replay episode, we looked at GOTG2 and AOU this week, two films that I can confidently say Taylor and I don’t rewatch often. There’s, of course, nothing wrong with these films, and AOU holds a very special place in my heart, but they usually fade into the background for us. This just means that rewatching them was a great experience, as we could pick up on some of the small things. Not to mention, GOTG2 is an extremely strange rewatch now that Eternals has come out, and I can assure you a lot of our analysis is figuring out how Ego fits into our new understanding of the Celestials. All of this being said, let’s get right to it! As always, to hear our full thoughts and explanations, you can click the button below to find your listening platform of choice or start listening live by hitting play right in this blog post.

I already alluded to the main topic on our minds about Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, so let’s start with this film and get right into it. We are introduced to Peter’s dad, a character that we received quite a few interesting cues about in the first Guadians’ film. But what makes him more interesting than 90% of the horrible fathers the MCU puts forward is that he is a Celestial. Now, years ago, when this film came out, this was only the second movie, besides GOTG1 to mention this type of being. But now we can look at this from a completely different lens as we have Eternals, which broke down Celestials in a brand new way. Let’s get into some of these questions that I can’t say we have answers to, but we are still extremely curious about.

One of the most prominent things from Eternals is that Celestials need a certain amount of power, driven by living things, to emerge from the planets they are ‘placed’ in. Let’s run with this a little and apply it to Ego. Ego explains that when he was born (emerged), it was just his brain. He was aware of everything around him and pulled pieces floating in space around his brain to create his first so-called body aka his planet. My best running theory here is that for some reason, his emergence went wrong, and he never was born with a body. To protect himself, he sucked the debris from the planet his emergence destroyed back to him. Now I have no clue why an emergence wouldn’t go right, or at least how it could go so wrong the Celestial doesn’t have a body, but it’s all I can think of. Luckily, others have put some thought into this and come up with a great theory. Essentially, this theory believes that the Eternals on Ego’s planet were unable to prevent a catastrophic event from possibly killing great numbers of beings. Because of this, the other Celestials assume Ego to be unable to emerge or is dead, but rather the disturbance awakens him earlier than planned, leaving him with just a brain. Ego assumed himself to be the only one, but I figure he found other Celestials when he journeyed to other planets. This angered him and is part of the reason he wished to spread on other planets, to assert his dominance as a Celestial and prevent other Celestials from emerging.

While we sum this all up to say he is clearly a different type of Celestial/something didn’t go right with his emergence, it’s still hard to wrap your head around. The worst part is, we likely will never get more information on him now that he has been destroyed, unless Eternals 2 hits on it, so the discrepancies are just going to run wild, and all we can do is pray we find theories to fill them. I hope maybe Eros brings some knowledge to the party in Eternals 2, since he seems to have some knowledge about taking down Celestials, but we shall see.

Beyond the Celestial debate, we also have Eternity’s name dropped in this film, and yes, that’s Eternity with a capital “E.” Of course, this should sound familiar to everyone because not that long ago we were watching Thor: Love and Thunder, in which we meet Eternity. To Taylor’s point, this isn’t super weird since Ego considered himself a God, and you need a God to help open the gateway. What’s mainly the most interesting is that this was dropped to us in roughly 2015, and we didn’t think a thing of it until a movie that came out in 2022 brought our attention to it. I like when things happen like that.

Of course, as with all other Marvel movies up to this point, we also got our usual cameo from the man himself: Stan Lee. But I have to bring attention to this one specifically since it’s a little different than the others. For one, he looks as if he is talking to three Watchers, which is something we would not have thought of at all at the time this film came out. It is especially interesting because if you catch what he’s saying, he’s essentially telling them he has been playing different roles in all the storylines we see as films. Now, this gets into some of the meta things we are hitting now with the Quantum realm and Multiverses, but this pretty much means Stan was never technically a character and was instead almost crashing in, as he exists outside all those storylines, like the Watcher. It definitely has layers to it, which I don’t want to think too much about for fear of destroying my brain, but it’s pretty freaking cool.

Lastly, I have to wrap up GOTG2 by saying this movie really solidified how much I love these characters. They’re extremely dysfunctional, but they are a family, and I really had fun getting to rewatch this franchise. It makes me even more nervous about what is coming in GOTG3, as I feel like I’ve fallen in love all over again with this group. And don’t even get me started on Baby Groot, him trying to free Rocket and Yondu may just be one of the best things I’ve ever seen in my life.

Turning now to the other film we watched for this replay, Avengers: Age of Ultron, I have to disclose that this film, in my mind, will never do any wrong. This is the film that brought me into the Marvel Universe and started this journey for me, so I will absolutely always hold it very close to my heart for that reason. Do I ignore the last 10-15 minutes and actually just decide the movie ends when they evacuate the city? Of course, because as far as I’m concerned, no one loses their life. I don’t know what everyone is talking about. But truly, this film doesn’t deserve some of the hate I know it gets from the fans.

The best part about this film is that it is exactly what all the fanfiction in the world is about: the Avengers being a genuine team of heroes that like each other and hang out. If you know what’s coming soon, you know this doesn’t last very long, but it’s there for at least a movie. They joke with one another and have little parties. It’s all very nice to see for the brief little bit that we get it.

Of course, what I appreciate the most is the solid continuity of some parts, while others just sort of, I don’t know, don’t work. For one, I like that the movie shows that they’ve spent so much time together because they were taking out Hydra bases, a direct effect of CATWS. But then again, Black Widow said she was going to disappear for a while because all of her covers were blown, and here she is with the Avengers. I mean, taking out the Guardians films, those movies take place one after the other. Yet, if we flip back to the other side, Sam appears talking about their missing person case aka Bucky, again a direct impact from CATWS. And then we have Fury, who goes AWOL after faking his death, showing up with a SHIELD plane at the end of the film like it’s no biggie. See what I mean? Random parts just don’t listen to the rest, but I do appreciate the scenes that do.

I warned everyone during our CATWS coverage that this film was going to get ugly when it came to talking about my girl Nat. And man, is it ugly. Once again, I reiterate these films technically take place RIGHT AFTER EACH OTHER. So tell me, how did we go from that Natasha to this? I mean, I know how, and it comes 100% down to the director of this film. It just makes me so angry. She was so freaking cool in CATWS, and suddenly they just completely downgrade her. Not to mention, the random and awkward romance between her and Bruce really sets fire to everything. There was never an ounce of chemistry between the two, I don’t know how that even happens. It is one of the biggest pitfalls of this film, and I will stand on that rock alone if I have to.

While we are on the topic of characters, I want to take this moment to talk about Wanda briefly. The first thing I have to say is I miss emo Wanda so much. The other thing, which is much more important, is that if you would have told me what this girl became and what she is capable of in the future, I would have only been shocked because I would have hoped she wouldn’t have had to go through all the pain to get there. I think many people act like she doesn’t have a dark side when quite literally she starts as a Hydra power in this film. Not to mention, look at how she reacted to Pietro’s death. And the final bit of icing on the cake is this girl mind controlled a whole town into evacuating, yet everyone was so shocked at what happened with Westview. We saw what she was capable of doing very early on, and I’m proud of her growth, even if I disagree with how MoM portrayed it.

As we are on the topic, I want to wrap up discussing Thor’s nightmare that Wanda induces. His is the only nightmare that happens perfectly, although I think people tend to focus the most on Tony’s. He loses most of his people, Asgard falls, and Hel(a) is part of the whole equation. The fear that Thor has becomes reality quickly for him, which is something I don’t think many point out. While Tony’s fear partially comes true, Thor’s, except for the fact that he didn’t directly kill his people, comes true. On top of this, he is the one who sees the vision relating to the Infinity Stones and is why Vision is born. I might argue all of this drives Thor to be one of the most integral parts of the team in this film, putting besides all his Godly powers.

While there is much more to talk about, I can’t physically write everything, so go ahead and give our latest Replay series podcast episode a listen if you haven’t already. Next week, we will be continuing the Replay series with Ant-Man and Captain America: Civil War (or the more accurate title of Avengers: Civil War). After that, get ready, as we are gearing up for Ant-Man: Quantumania. Tickets are already on sale so make sure you snag those for opening weekend and stick around here, as we will be covering it from start to finish. As we finish this month, I want to remind everyone to sign up for our newsletter, making its way into your inbox on the first of each month. February’s topic is “Understanding the Quantum Realm,” just in time for Ant-Man 3. In the meantime, watch Ant-Man 1 and CACW so you can be on our level next episode, and remember, Marvel just blew your mind, so let’s talk about it.

Image: “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2”, Disney

Image: “Avengers: Age of Ultron”, IMDB

Traveling back to Phase 2 this week (three phases ago now if you want to feel some pain).

It has been quite a long time since we visited our Marvel Replay series, as 2022 definitely kept us busy with content. I would like to think we accrued some new fans along the way and I also wouldn’t blame anyone for forgetting what the Replay series is about, so let me provide a little bit of a reminder. Our Replay series looks at the MCU’s first three phases in timeline order. We go back and watch the films and then discuss some of the things the films led to that we didn’t realize at the time, small things we missed, or just general things that no longer make sense due to a continuity issue. This week, we took a look at CATWS (and if I type TFAWS anywhere ignore it) and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol.1. As always, the full episode can be found on the platform of your choice by clicking the button below or you can listen live right now by hitting play on the link provided.

While there isn’t exactly proof that one of these films happens before the other, as one is in space, I’m going to start with CATWS which should come as no surprise to literally anyone. This remains my absolute favorite film that has ever come out of Marvel and no one needs to be shocked as to why. So because I can’t not talk about him, let me jump in about Bucky aka The Winter Soldier right off the bat. Putting aside my love for him, I, to this day, believe he started the streak of really solid villains and especially sympathetic ones. I think he gets written off a lot, especially now that villains like Killmonger and Gorr have appeared, but Bucky is the blueprint for a villain you feel bad for. He’s fighting for a cause that brainwashed him to keep him compliant. And he is one terrifying villain. Something Taylor and I both noticed (technically I’ve noticed before considering I watch this film like once a month) is that if this movie had had a higher rating, Bucky alone would have made it considerably gory. He’s a ruthless killing machine and this is really the only time with the exception of a section of Civil War that we see it clear as day.

I want to talk about Natasha briefly as well, since this is the best version of her we have ever seen on screen. This version of Nat is what the comics created her like and what an assassin of her caliber is built to act like. I will say it again probably every film she is in and you have heard me say it already, but Nat as a character suffered the most throughout the whole MCU, with different directors struggling to portray her. This film played her just right, mysterious but also insanely reliable and she definitely had those Black Widow moves. She isn’t played down because she doesn’t have powers or abilities and she isn’t made to come off differently because she is a woman (I’m looking at you AOU). She is a lot like the Natasha we were introduced to in Iron Man 2, which would be great if we weren’t getting different versions of her everywhere else. While I agree with Taylor in saying Black Widow the film was too late, putting that Natasha up with CATWS Natasha does actually make a lot of sense as a whole.

Last, as far as characters I want to focus on before other plot points is Mr. Steve Rogers himself. This film is also the only time I feel we get a genuine character study on who he is. I think Iron Man’s trilogy did a great job keeping the focus on understanding who Tony is and his struggles, versus Cap’s who really only had this film. His first movie was focused on origin and his third was pretty much an Avengers movie. In CATWS, we get to really understand Steve as he is learning this new world that he finds himself in. He struggles with modern things but also his inner struggle to want to continue to do right thing or just stop and maybe live a life. But most importantly, we see him find a reason to keep going and that’s finding Bucky. Even after everything with SHIELD and Hydra, he finds the one person he always relied on to be there for him, someone he had thought he lost and that helps keep him here in the present. At least until, Endgame (rolling my eyes so hard).

Moving into a huge plot point from this film, something I know Taylor and I discussed during Black Widow and has now appeared again is the fact that Nat unleashes all of SHIELD and Hydra’s classified documents onto the internet. This is a huge moment in the film, with what should be larger implications, but unfortunately it’s something we don’t really get much screentime on at all. We get maybe a throw away line here or there, but we really never see how much this effects the world. Beyond that, films such as Black Widow start to have some issues in them, when theoretically Hydra would likely have known about the operation of the Red Room, especially since Nat put it on the map to begin with. I doubt Hydra knew it was shut down and that information likely would have been in files that, I don’t know, were just plastered on the web. It’s a plot line that I have somewhat given up on ever getting the full effects of and it doesn’t fall on this movie being at fault, more so some of the others for never really picking up the thread.

Pivoting like Ross on Friends, let’s move into a completely different realm and fly ourselves to space, where we see the formation of the Guardians of the Galaxy. The Guardians’ films was the first (in release order) to really touch on this whole space thing and life that sits beyond ours. Yes, we have Thor, but the Guardians show the galaxy in a more in-depth manner and of course the comedy brought a completely different air to these films. Even just rewatching the first one had me cackling at moments, simply because characters like Drax are written so well to have impeccable comedic timing. All five of them are incredibly awkward beings that have enough problems to cover the whole world for awhile, and their teaming up just becomes a weird bowl of almost Avengers. It’s hilarious to watch them interact with each other and is always a good break from some of the more serious storylines taking place on Earth.

But getting into the film’s meat a little more, I want to discuss something that is going to be a big topic when we get into the second Guardians film, which is Nowhere. We are introduced to this “planet” as a mining area for all sorts of rare but powerful materials because the place is the severed head of a Celestial. This is, at the time, the first mention of a Celestial in the MCU. But I want to talk about this for two reasons, one: did the head become severed when the Celestial died of natural causes and it just floated into space? Did someone beat the Celestial in battle? I like the second theory a little more, as I don’t see how a natural death would have completely severed the head, unless someone ripped the body apart after (sorry this seems morbid but it’s essentially like a robot in my head). My point being, if someone either killed or took apart the body of a Celestial, than that is one likely powerful being that I would like to know of. My second reason about the Celestial is that we now have one on Earth that is rumored to have some great materials in their body (Adamantium) that a certain group might be going after in their upcoming film. Seems interesting that a Phase 2 film possibly and unknowingly set something up for Phase 5 and we had no clue.

Let’s momentarily discuss Ronan the Accuser, who starts this film doing Thanos’ bidding and is gifted his two daughters to work with him. First, I have got to say this dude can’t catch a break. Of course I’m not rooting for him, but nothing goes right for him. When Gamora betrays the whole operation, he is single-handedly blamed for alienting Thanos’ favorite daughter. But I also find it interesting thatThanos simply could have used Gamora and Nebula from the jump and gotten the stone rather than using a go-between, which he does a lot in these first few films. It isn’t until AOU, which we will discuss soon, that he decides to take matters into his own hands. A curious thing for the Mad Titan to do. But going back to Ronan something that I didn’t care for much at the time of this film coming out, but now seems a lot more important since Captain Marvel, is that Ronan is a Kree extremist. Which suddenly has me thinking if he knew Captain Marvel for one, and why didn’t she intervene with him at all since he was widely well known in the Galaxy. And the big one for me is, where was she when he tried to destroy an entire planet? Seems like a massive galaxy-wide threat to me. Clearly I have to learn what her criteria is for getting involved in situations.

This film was a big one for the Infinity Saga, as it brought into perspective the Infinity Stones once again. We were introduced to the Power Stone, which doesn’t really need any explanation on what it does. This stone nearly ends up with the Collector, who already has the Aether (Reality Stone) chilling in his collection, but the Guardians of course take the Power Stone once they realize what it is. Personally, this film feels like the first we really begin to understand that Thanos is collecting them and we see that through the lens of Gamora as well. When she realizes the power the stone truly has, she willingly would do anything to avoid it getting into Ronan or her father’s hands. This is where it begins, as the shift between the halves of the Infinity Saga takes place between these two movies. From here, Infinity Stones are everywhere and very quickly so is Thanos. Those familiar with the Phantom of the Opera will know this quote that fits so well here as we go: “Past the point of no return”.

These films together are a little wonky to look at, but they are both great films to go back and watch. Of course, CATWS is known as one of the best, and as I just mentioned, GOTG1 begins us down the slippery slide that we were only coasting down before. As we go further into the MCU at it’s current stage, it’s a lot of fun to go back and see where some of these older films played a bigger part that we didn’t understand before. I hope you guys are enjoying the Replay series as we cover the Infinity Saga because there’s more to come. Our next episode will pick up here with Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 and Avengers: Age of Ultron! Make sure you watch those films in preparation for hearing all our thoughts on them, coming soon. And as always, before Ant-Man 3 comes around, use this time to catch up on Phase 4 content, along with our parallel content, since Marvel just blew your m find, so let’s talk about it.

Image: “Captain America: The Winter Soldier”, Disney

Image: “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol.1”, Space.com staff, Space