I think that's why Guardians of the Galaxy ranks near or at the top of my Marvel movie list -- it's one of the only ones that doesn't feel like a two-hour commercial for the next film.
Did you really feel with the majority of the Marvel movies that, as you were watching them, they only felt like they were setting up sequels? For me, that was only Iron Man 2.
I can't see how Iron Man, Hulk, Captain America (except for the last 5 minutes), Iron Man 3, Thor 2 and Avengers felt this way if you're being totally honest. Guardians probably has more hints at what is to come than all of those combined, in fact.
Iron Man 1 / 3 and
The Incredible Hulk (which I feel is terribly underrated) are the exceptions; all the others, to me, felt like they were farting around for two hours as a way of saying, "Don't worry,
The Avengers is going to be really great! That's the one you should be excited for!" They just felt creatively empty, by-the-numbers stuff that existed solely to set up the big team-up movie (and I feel that shows in their scripts;
Captain America falls completely off the rails in its third act,
Thor grinds to a screeching halt the minute he falls to Earth and only barely recovers some momentum when its third act begins, etc.).
I mean, I get it. Marvel's film strategy is
brilliant content marketing -- it's just that it's led to very empty filmmaking, and I generally believe that isn't going to change given that with a few exceptions they continue to hire workman directors who will just churn stuff out of the factory (like
Thor 2, which was actually pretty decent because it was divorced of all the world-building shit, but was so incredibly ugly). At least
Iron Man 3 and
Guardians were genuinely stylistic, and you can point to them and say, "Yeah, Shane Black and James Gunn had their hands all over those two films." Say what you will about
The Amazing Spider-Man 2's cluttered disaster of a script, but at least its visual and especially sound design was
incredible.
