The X-Men Cinematic Universe (General Discussion)
- Thread starter DigificWriter
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And it's not like there was any point getting into continuity debates about X-Men films even before this point. I don't think they've yet managed to go even a single movie without creating some kind of contradiction or another.
And that's fine. Logan is far and away my favourite X-Men movie and I don't care how it relates to the other movies. It's how it relates to the characters that matters to me.
And that's fine. Logan is far and away my favourite X-Men movie and I don't care how it relates to the other movies. It's how it relates to the characters that matters to me.
In the history of film, you'd be hard-pressed to find a movie series that didn't have major discontinuities and retcons between installments. Many never even bothered to maintain more than a superficial pretense of continuity, like the Universal Monsters films or the original Planet of the Apes films. Audiences today seem to think that absolutely perfect continuity is a requirement, but the reality is that loose continuity has historically been the norm. Even the MCU has its inconsistencies, like Iron Man retiring at the end of one film and being back in the armor in the next.
The first Iron Man movie also established SHIELD as a new organization that didn't quite know what to call itself, while the second movie established Tony's long-dead father as one of the founders.
Calling an example like that an inconsistency would be stretching, IMO.
I have the same reaction. There is nothing particularly wrong... just nothing that makes it must-watch either.
He didn’t really retire. He just blew up the suits that were made during his panic attack phase.
He scaled back and still made suits. Probably at slower intervals
You mean the film that ends with him saying "I am Iron Man"? Doesn't sound like a retirement to me. And who at that point could possibly have been gullible enough to think that Avengers 2 wouldn't have an armored Iron Man in it? When It was revealed that Stark wasn't being recommended for the Avengers at the end of Iron Man 2, did anybody really think Stark wouldn't be Iron Man in The Avengers?
There were no contradictions between the first two films, and I don't think The Wolverine contradicted anything in and of itself. When X-Men 3 was released, it only produced the minor issue of a human-looking Hank McCoy having been briefly shown in X2 ( though that kind of thing is easily enough explained by the kind of things we saw in later films ).
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agreed. It looks mostly like stuff that's been done before, and not very well the first time.
The point is not about whether you can rationalize it after the fact, since you can rationalize anything after the fact. The point is about his character development and the way his personal growth in his solo movies tends to be reset in the team-up movies. Plus there are other continuity glitches in the MCU, like Spider-Man: Homecoming's "8 years later" vis-a-vis the Battle of New York, or the inconsistencies in Thanos's (and the Infinity Gauntlet's) early cameos vs. Infinity War. Not to mention the glitches between the movies and the TV shows supposedly set in the same universe, like how the Manhattan skyline in the Netflix shows includes the MetLife Building rather than having Stark/Avengers Tower in its place.
Common misconception, but no SHIELD was not said to be new in 'Iron Man'. Coulson just gave a dry "we're working on it" when Tony said they need to find a better name that "Strategic Homeland yadda-yadda-yadda..." Some people just took it a little too literally.
Mostly at that time SHIELD was just very much in the shadows and neither Stark nor Pepper had heard of them.
Indeed, it's later stated (I forget where; possibly CA:CW) that the events of 'Avengers' were the first time SHIELD openly revealed itself to the public.
That's not an inconsistency, that's just you missing the whole point of the movie (not to mention literally the last line before the credits rolled.)
I took the "working on it" line as a reference to the fact that the phrase SHIELD stood for has been changed from time to time in the comics. Per Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.H.I.E.L.D.
Which may also have been the referent for Grant Ward's line in the Agents of SHIELD pilot -- "It means someone really wanted our initials to spell out 'SHIELD'."
Although The Winter Soldier showed that the modern "backronym" was in use back when SHIELD was founded, so evidently they never changed the name in the MCU, unless they changed it and went back.
(I prefer the original name, since it's international. "Homeland" implies something more nationalistic.)
That thought crossed my mind too.
Nah, he was just being sarcastic.
I agree, Coulson has a very wry sense of humor.
Which might or might not be a retcon.
The film that is also all about him having serious issues because of his Iron man activities, in which Pepper repeatedly tells him to stop and his big character moment at the end is largely fueled by seeing her seemingly die. It was a more than ambiguous enough issue to cause major confusion at the time.
More to the point, though, Tony literally confirms that he *was* trying to retire in one of the more recent films. It just didn't take.
His increased Iron Man activities weren't the problem, they were a symptom. He was using his suits as a coping mechanism to try and ward off the bone chilling terror. The core anxiety at play here wasn't "OMG the aliens are still coming!" it was about Tony feeling so exposed and vulnerable that he'd developed an impostor complex. Hence the recurring theme of "Iron Man" embodied as an external character; the kid pointing to the suit saying "is that iron Man", the suit walking around the house on it's own, grabbing Pepper in the middle of the night. Hell, could the imagery of having to drag the empty suit through the snow, unable to cozy up inside it be any less subtle?
The conclusion of the movies wasn't that he didn't want the suits anymore it was that they didn't define who he was and he was able to reconcile with that part of himself. Hence: "I am Iron Man." Blowing up the suits wasn't a "I don't want the suits anymore" statement it was a "I don't NEED them *as a security blanket* anymore, nor do they define me." The suits aren't Iron Man, HE is Iron Man.
His "retirement" wasn't until the end of AoU, which is why in CW he's initially there as a consultant only.
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