MCU is faltering and should take a hint from the Marvel movies that came before it.

I love the Marvel Cinematic Universe. And as a fan I can acknowledge that as much as I enjoy them, a lot of them aren't great. Hell, I'm fairly certain Ant-Man and Wasp was just a long car chase. One third of Endgame was just Captain America and Black Widow sitting around looking hungover. It's a lot of stuff that I could do without in a superhero film.

And listen, I get it, movies need fluff. I loved Shang-Chi but if you removed all the stuff that was just leading in to the big action scene at the end you'd have something the length of an episode of Paw Patrol. You gotta fill out that world.

But here's the thing MCU seems to constantly forget, they make superhero films. Don't get me wrong, they do the non-super hero stuff great sometimes. The scene I referenced in my previous article about the first 10 MCU films when Peter Parker is in the car with the Vulture? AMAZING.

But we need more stuff that involves the powers. We don't pay to see a Spider-Man movie just to watch the will they/won't they between Happy and Aunt May. We're not looking to see Thor dick around for a half an hour trying to build a new hammer just for him to get his old one back anyways. Let's do some cool stuff.

As much as I didn't like the X-Men films, there was something that a lot of the current MCU films seem to forget about, the love of the actual characters. Star-Lord, Iron Man, and Doctor Strange share a scene where they all kinda act just like each other. While the X-Men films had scenes that showed genuine love for the characters they were writing.

For a master class in what I mean, we go to 2014's X-Men: Days of Futures Past and 2016's X-Men: Apocalypse where Bryan Singer, flawed as he may be, wrote two absolute love letters to Quicksilver into the films. First, let's look at Days of Futures Past:

In this scene, Quicksilver goes with Professor X and Wolverine to break out Magneto from a facility that, oddly, has security with plastic guns, but the most metal kitchen I've ever seen in my life.

He puts on goggles to protect his eyes and headphones to protect the whistling in the ears. Very quickly they set a precident for him where objects he touches breaks free from the standard flow of time which helps show a subtle mastery of his abilities.

We see him thwart every guard in the room in a variety of ways, never simply hitting someone but instead causing them to hit themselves, or each other. At the same time he's rerouting bullets, stealing a hat, giving one guard the worst wedgie in cinema history, and even sampling the worst looking soup I've ever seen on camera.

It also showcases the character's attitude as he goes about it like a walking version of the "oh shit, here we go again" meme. And at the end he gets one of the rarest things an X-Men can get, a genuine thanks from Wolverine. (Though, my god, Chuck and Erik do NOTHING and I hate it.)

Two years later, he's back at it again in 2016's X-Men: Apocalypse. And while the had it's own problems, Quicksilver was not one of them. In fact, he saves 32 people, 2 fish, and 1 dog while also hitting a bullseye, grabbing a drink, and giving a kid a make over. All in the span of about one second.

Think about it. A second stretched out into 3 minutes. The insane level of detail as we follow the path of the explosion. The way we follow up on the location of where everyone that was saved ended up. It's insane.

And again, the showcase Quicksilver's powers right at the beginning by having the Twinkie and the card hover in the air after Quicksilver lets go of them really showing off his control of that which he holds.

It's just insane and fully covers his personality. With the MCU about to get a massive dump of Marvel Mutants, we need to see this kind of love brought back to the characters.