Absent Thor 2, it made little sense for the heroes of Iron Man 3 and Cap 2 to not involve some or all of the other Avengers in each movie's plot devices.
It makes sense in IM3, because Tony's alone and cut off from his support system for a lot of it -- and because even after
The Avengers, he's still an arrogant loner who's prone to believe he can do it all himself. Note how ready he was to cut out the rest of the team (aside from Bruce) in
Age of Ultron. And the climactic events proceeded too quickly for him to call on much support beyond his immediate circle.
And I think it makes sense in
The Winter Soldier, because Cap has SHIELD as his support structure for the first part of the movie, and is then on the run and isolated afterward. He might not even have known if he could trust Stark, and he might not have known where to find Thor, who has no listed address or phone number.
Really, up until TWS, the Avengers were really just a SHIELD protocol. Cap, Widow, and Hawkeye were SHIELD agents first and foremost, Stark and Banner were independent contractors they occasionally called on, and Thor was a free agent whose comings and goings were unpredictable. Reading between the lines of the movies, I'd say that it wasn't until the fall of SHIELD that the Avengers really, well, assembled as an independent concern run by Stark, in order to fill the void left by SHIELD. Cap, Widow, Hawkeye, and Hill ended up working for Stark Industries/the Avengers full-time, presumably with Banner on board as Science Bro and occasional green muscle, and then Thor recruited them to help him find Loki's scepter and retrieve it from Hydra. And that's how we get from TWS to AoU. But before TWS, we still basically had SHIELD, Stark, Banner, and Thor all going their own separate ways. I think that does hold together as a logical progression in the narrative. Of course it's a contrivance, just like it's a contrivance in the comics that Superman doesn't clean up all of Gotham City's crime in an afternoon, but as contrivances go, it's a reasonably well-justified one.
I agree with this; however, there was another problem. I can't really figure out why (the special effects?, the acting, the direction?), but it was very difficult to take Hal and the Corps seriously. The attempts at humor came across as silly and there were too many unintentional comedic moments.
That would probably come down more to the director, I suppose. Humor is tricky.
Trying to fit too much into the movie was also a problem. It would have worked much better as an Earth based story with Hector Hammond as the villain while leaving out the Corps entirely. If the Corps had to be introduced, it could have simply been as observers setting up plans to contact Jordan in the sequel.
I've heard (and shared) this sentiment in the past. It would've been better to do an Earth-based first film and just hint at the larger Corps, then save the Corps for a sequel. That's what the comics did -- it was quite a while before Hal started meeting other GLs and learning about the Guardians and Oa. (One nice detail in the movie is that the first other Lantern he met was Tomar-Re, as in the comics.)
Of course, there were other things the movie fumbled, like the actual superheroics. Pro tip: if the villains spend several minutes endangering or killing a whole bunch of people and the hero then belatedly shows up and saves exactly one person, then the hero is doing it wrong. Extra points off if the one person the hero bothers to save is someone who might sleep with him. (Although this applies far more to
Man of Steel than to GL.)
Still, I've never felt
Green Lantern was that bad. I think it was an okay movie, but it suffered from coming out in the same year as three superlative Marvel movies. If it had come out five or six years earlier, around the time that we were getting
Elektra and
Fantastic Four and
X-Men: The Last Stand, I think it would've been seen as pretty good by comparison.
